“Women, women!” he exclaimed fussily. “The master of that house will never think of women any more. There was another one here this evening, crying as if this old earth were a cage and she were shut in it. She was a beautiful lady, too, with great blue eyes; but not a soul in that house, I tell you, stirred out to her. So at last she went groping away in the blackness. You had better go too. I am guarding the gate so that he shall die in peace. Besides,” he added, “there is no one to let you in. The servants ran away, being afraid of the Plague—all but one boy. A young boy, a good boy; he is a Visayan, as so am I. They will stand by when Tagalogs take to their heels.”
A vivid intuition flashed through the girl’s soul. Stepping past the wordy policeman, she pressed her face close against the bars of the gate. “Delphine!” she called, again and again through the night.
A window slid open above. She could distinguish a slight figure standing in the aperture.
Tremulously she called again: “Delphine! It is I—your maestra.”
The boy’s wondering treble answered her: “Maestra!”
Tears of triumph rolled down her face.
“Come quickly, and open the gate!”
He was coming. She listened for every fall of his hurrying slippers.
At last a white camisa came fluttering through the darkness, the brave white camisa of the poor little brown knight who had set out so long ago for the grand adventure.
“Maestra, my Maestra!” he exclaimed softly and incredulously, staring at her through the bars of the gate.