“Madre de Dios!” she yelled. “What a you do that a for?” and she menaced the poor Spaniard with her small fist.
“It was I, it was I,” pleaded Mrs. Thornton. “Don’t blame him.” But Murella turned from her with high scorn.
“Fool, I will kill a him,” she shrieked, again turning to the place where the man had stood.
But Señor Don Manuel Jose Maria Ignacio Cervantes Alvarado, knowing something of the temper of his niece, had attended not upon the order of his going, but slipped away, and in his place stood Morning. For one brief moment Murella looked at him, then, drawing a pearl-handled stiletto from beneath her girdle, she gashed and stabbed the unconscious canvas in twice a dozen places, crying all the time, “Take a that, and a that, and a that!”
Morning thought that his time had come, but he manfully stood his ground, secretly smiling at the bloodless assassination, until, exhausted, Murella fell upon the carpet in a genuine hysterical rage. After a moment he lifted her to her feet, placed her hand within his arm, and led her unresistingly from the room.
An hour later she stood at the boathouse, leaning upon the arm of Prince Fillipo, and gayly waving an adieu to the party, Morning among them; then, with the artist’s arm about her waist, they slowly returned up the terrace steps, while the decorated steamer went out of sight around the cove.
And the Baroness Von Eulaw guessed now who it was that had made the pin holes in her eyes.
CHAPTER XXV.
“No more shall nation against nation rise.”
The Congress of 1892 builded even better than it knew, when it dropped partisan prejudices, and arose superior to local fetterings, and, in a truly national spirit, secured for the United States of America dominion of the seas and control of the commerce of the world.
The Act of Congress which guaranteed the payment of five per cent bonds of the Nicaragua Canal Company to the extent of $100,000,000, and which provided that the canal tolls upon American ships should never be more than two-thirds the amount charged the vessels of other nations, enabled the company to construct the canal with unexpected rapidity, without calling upon the United States for a dollar of the guaranty, while, more than any subsidy or favorable mail contract, it aided to place the Stars and Stripes at the mastheads of the vast fleet of ships and steamers which, upon the completion of the canal in the autumn of 1895, began to pass between the Atlantic and the Pacific.