face was uncovered.  All these and other things I noticed and remembered, yet at the time it seemed to me that I saw nothing except the figure of the victim.  I knew her again, although I had seen her but once in the moonlight.  She was changed indeed, her lovely face was fuller and the great tormented eyes shone like stars against its waxen pallor, relieved by the carmine of her lips alone.  Still it was the same face that some eight months before I had seen lifted in entreaty to her false lover.  Now her tall shape was wrapped about with grave clothes over which her black hair streamed, and in her arms she bore a sleeping babe that from time to time she pressed convulsively to her breast.

On the threshold of her tomb Isabella de Siguenza paused and looked round wildly as though for help, scanning each of the silent watchers to find a friend among them.  Then her eye fell upon the niche and the heap of smoking lime and the men who guarded it, and she shuddered and would have fallen had not those who attended her led her to the chair and placed her in it—­a living corpse.

Now the dreadful rites began.  The Dominican father stood before her and recited her offence, and the sentence that had been passed upon her, which doomed her, ’to be left alone with God and the child of your sin, that He may deal with you as He sees fit.’* To all of this she seemed to pay no heed, nor to the exhortation that followed.  At length he ceased with a sigh, and turning to me said: 

’Draw near to this sinner, brother, and speak with her before it is too late.’

* Lest such cruelty should seem impossible and unprecedented, the writer may mention that in the museum of the city of Mexico, he has seen the desiccated body of a young woman, which was found immured in the walls of a religious building.  With it is the body of an infant.  Although the exact cause of her execution remains a matter of conjecture, there can be no doubt as to the manner of her death, for in addition to other evidences, the marks of the rope with which her limbs were bound in life are still distinctly visible.  Such in those days were the mercies of religion!

Then he bade all present gather themselves at the far end of the vault that our talk might not be overheard, and they did so without wonder, thinking doubtless that I was a monk sent to confess the doomed woman.

So I drew near with a beating heart, and bending over her I spoke in her ear.

‘Listen to me, Isabella de Siguenza!’ I said; and as I uttered the name she started wildly.  ’Where is that de Garcia who deceived and deserted you?’

‘How have you learnt his true name?’ she answered.  ’Not even torture would have wrung it from me as you know.’

’I am no monk and I know nothing.  I am that man who fought with de Garcia on the night when you were taken, and who would have killed him had you not seized me.’

‘At the least I saved him, that is my comfort now.’