She put a finger to her lips, smiling.  “Such treasure you never did see. . . .  Even Rosa does not know. . . .  Come, little boy!”

She pushed her way through the laurels, and I followed her.  The edge of the shrubbery overhung the dry bed of a torrent, in the cleft of which, when we had lowered ourselves over the edge, we were completely hidden from the house.  From the edge a slope of loose stones ran down to the bottom of the cleft, where a thin stream of water trickled.  The stones slid with me, but not dangerously; and as we scurried down—­I in my thick boots, she in her diminutive dancing-shoes—­I heard Plinny’s voice join with Captain Branscome’s in calling my name.  But by this time I was committed to the adventure, and by-and-by they desisted, supposing (as Plinny told me later) that I had taken French leave again, and run off to be first at the clump of trees.

We might not climb the slope directly in face of us; for, by so doing (even if it had been accessible, which I doubt), we should have emerged into view.  We therefore bent our way to the right up the bottom of the gorge, to a narrow tongue of rock dividing it, in the shelter of which we mounted the rough stairway of the torrent bed from one flat rock to another until we stepped out upon a shallow plateau where the contour of the hills shut off the house and its terraces.  We stood, as I judged, upon the reverse or northern side of that ridge which to the south and west overlooked the valley of the treasure.  Above the plateau a stone-strewn scarp of earth led to the forest, which reached to the very summit of the ridge; and towards the summit, after pausing for a second or two to pant and catch her breath, my strange guide continued her climb.

“What is your name, little boy?”

I told her, and she repeated it once or twice, to get it by heart.

“You may call me ’Metta,” she said. “He calls me ’Metta always, when he is pleased with me, and that is almost every day.  He is kind to me; oh, yes, very kind—­though terrible, of course. . . .  Keep on my left hand, Harry Brooks; so the breeze here will not blow from me to you.”

I drew up in a kind of giddiness, for that dreadful scent of death had touched me again.  She, too, halted with a little cry of dismay, and a feeble motion of the hands, as if to wring them.

“Ah, you must keep wide of me. . . .  That is my suffering, Harry Brooks.  I cannot bend over a flower but it withers, and the butterflies die if they come near my breath . . . and that, too, is his doing.  He would be kind to me, he said, and would een-oculate me; yes, that is his word—­een-oculate me, so that no poison could ever harm me.  He knows the secrets of all the plants, and why people die of disease.  Months at a time he used to leave me alone with Rosa, and go to Havana, to the hospitals; and there he would study till his body was wasted away with work; but