your influence upon Senor Stewart?  Once he was merely an animal, brutal, unquickened; now he is a man—­I have not seen his like!  So I beseech you in my humble office as priest, as a lover of mankind, before you send Stewart to his death, to be sure there is here no mysterious dispensation of God.  Love, that mighty and blessed and unknown thing, might be at work.  Senora, I have heard that somewhere in the rich Eastern cities you are a very great lady.  I know you are good and noble.  That is all I want to know.  To me you are only a woman, the same as Senor Stewart is only a man.  So I pray you, Senora, before you let Stewart give you freedom at such cost be sure you do not want his love, lest you cast away something sweet and ennobling which you yourself have created.”

XXIII The Light of Western Stars

Blinded, like a wild creature, Madeline Hammond ran to her room.  She felt as if a stroke of lightning had shattered the shadowy substance of the dream she had made of real life.  The wonder of Danny Mains’s story, the strange regret with which she had realized her injustice to Stewart, the astounding secret as revealed by Padre Marcos—­these were forgotten in the sudden consciousness of her own love.

Madeline fled as if pursued.  With trembling hands she locked the doors, drew the blinds of the windows that opened on the porch, pushed chairs aside so that she could pace the length of her room.  She was now alone, and she walked with soft, hurried, uneven steps.  She could be herself here; she needed no mask; the long habit of serenely hiding the truth from the world and from herself could be broken.  The seclusion of her darkened chamber made possible that betrayal of herself to which she was impelled.

She paused in her swift pacing to and fro.  She liberated the thought that knocked at the gates of her mind.  With quivering lips she whispered it.  Then she spoke aloud: 

“I will say it—­hear it.  I—­I love him!”

“I love him!” she repeated the astounding truth, but she doubted her identity.

“Am I still Madeline Hammond?  What has happened?  Who am I?” She stood where the light from one unclosed window fell upon her image in the mirror.  “Who is this woman?”

She expected to see a familiar, dignified person, a quiet, unruffled figure, a tranquil face with dark, proud eyes and calm, proud lips.  No, she did not see Madeline Hammond.  She did not see any one she knew.  Were her eyes, like her heart, playing her false?  The figure before her was instinct with pulsating life.  The hands she saw, clasped together, pressed deep into a swelling bosom that heaved with each panting breath.  The face she saw—­ white, rapt, strangely glowing, with parted, quivering lips, with great, staring, tragic eyes—­this could not be Madeline Hammond’s face.

Yet as she looked she knew no fancy could really deceive her, that she was only Madeline Hammond come at last to the end of brooding dreams.  She swiftly realized the change in her, divined its cause and meaning, accepted it as inevitable, and straightway fell back again into the mood of bewildering amaze.