It was no mere compliment.  In all my wanderings I have not beheld the equal of Angela Dieu-donnee.  Though I can see her now, though I learned to paint in order that, however inadequately, I might make her likeness, I am unable to describe her; words can give no idea of the comeliness of her face, the grace of her movements, and the shapeliness of her form.  I have seen women with skins as fair, hair as dark, eyes as deeply blue, but none with the same brightness of look and sweetness of disposition, none with courage as high, temper as serene.

To look at Angela was to love her, though as yet I knew not that I had regained my liberty only to lose my heart.  My feelings at the moment oscillated between admiration of her and a painful sense of my own disreputable appearance.  Bareheaded and shoeless, covered with the dust of the desert, clad only in a torn shirt and ragged trousers, my arms and legs scored with livid marks, I must have seemed a veritable scarecrow.  Angela looked like a queen, or would have done were queens ever so charming, or so becomingly attired.  Her low-crowned hat was adorned with beautiful flowers; a loose-fitting alpaca robe of light blue set off her form to the best advantage, and round her waist was a golden baldrick which supported a sheaf of arrows.  At her breast was an orchid which in Europe would have been almost priceless, her shapely arms were bare to the shoulder, and her sandaled feet were innocent of hosen.

I was wondering who could have designed this costume, in which there was a savor of the pictures of Watteau and the court of Versailles, how so lovely a creature could have found her way to a place so remote as San Cristobal de Quipai, when the abbe resumed the conversation.

“Angela came to us as strangely and unexpectedly as you have come, Monsieur Nigel” (he found my Christian name the easier to pronounce), “and, like you, without any volition on her part or previous knowledge of our existence.  But there is this difference between you:  she came as a little child, you come as a grown man.  Sixteen years ago we had several severe earthquakes.  They did us little harm down here, but up on the Cordillera they wrought fearful havoc, and the sea rose and there was a great storm, and several ships were dashed to pieces against our iron-bound coast, which no mariner willingly approaches.  The morning after the tempest there was found on the edge of the cliffs a cot in which lay a rosy-cheeked babe.  How it came to pass none could tell, but we all thought that the cot must have been fastened to a board, which became detached from the cot at the very moment when the sea threw it on the land.  The babe was just able to lisp her name—­’Angela,’ which corresponded with the name embroidered on her clothing.  This is all we know about her; and I greatly fear that those to whom she belonged perished in the storm.  Even the wreckage that was washed ashore furnished no clew; it was part of two different vessels.  The little waif was brought to me and with me she has ever since remained.”