"You can prevent it yourself; if you have no papers belonging to the Señor Evaña, you can find them."
Just then the door opened and Magdalen entered the room. Seeing the miserable state of her father she ran to him.
"Papa! papa!" she said, throwing herself on his breast, "what has this man been saying to you? Do not believe a word he says, I know that he comes here as your friend to do some treachery to you. Pay no attention to him."
"Look you, Don Alfonso," said Asneiros, "I give you three days to find those papers. If you do not find them you will explain to the Viceroy, and not to me, why you have secret hiding-places cut in the walls of your house."
At that, Don Alfonso thrust his daughter from him, and gazing with terror-stricken eyes at Asneiros tried in vain to speak, but Asneiros, turning from him went out through the door and through the porch and walked rapidly away.
Don Alfonso passed a sleepless night sitting in his arm-chair moaning and lamenting, Magdalen doing all she could to comfort him, till he sternly bade her leave him, saying that she had brought all this trouble upon him by attracting Asneiros to the quinta.
The next day Don Alfonso walked into the city, went straight to the house of Don Carlos Evaña, and told him everything that had occurred on the previous night, after he had left the quinta. Evaña listened somewhat scornfully, but looking at the haggard cheeks and blood-shot eyes of the old man, he felt pity for him.
"He wants proofs of a conspiracy? Pues! He shall have them. Here is all the conspiracy that there is," said he, taking up a copy of the Diario which lay upon the table, "and his Excellency the Viceroy is at the head of us. We are conspiring to educate the people, and I fully believe that the Señor Asneiros is correct in thinking that it imperils the existence of Spanish rule among us."
Don Alfonso looked helplessly at him, and answered:
"He spoke of a letter from my brother, how has he come to know of that? The letter you gave me from him I have burned, I kept it two days, then I burned it. I always do, I want no letters from Francisco. What matters to me his plans, all that I want is to live in peace. Cannot you help me in some way? You told me that the time of arrests and confiscations was gone, and I lived without fear, but it appears that is all to begin again."