“Hush!” said Miss Keene, with a sudden recollection of the Commander’s suspicions, “for Heaven’s sake; you do not know what you are saying.  Look! they were talking with that strange man, and now they are coming this way.”

The Commander and his secretary approached them.  They were both more than usually grave; but the look of inquiry and suspicion with which they regarded the two women was gone from their eyes.

“The Senor Comandante says you are free, Senoras, and begs you will only decide whether you will remain his guests or the guests of the Alcalde.  But for the present he cannot allow you any communication with the prisoners of San Antonio.”

“There is further news?” said Miss Keene faintly, with a presentiment of worse complications.

“There is!  A body from the Excelsior has been washed on shore.”

The two women turned pale.

“In the pocket of the murdered man is an accusation against one Senor Hurlstone, who was concealed on the ship; who came not ashore openly with the other passengers, but who escaped in secret, and is now hiding somewhere in Todos Santos.”

“And you suspect him of this infamous act?” said Eleanor, forgetting all prudence in her indignation.  “You are deceiving yourself.  He is as innocent as I am!”

The Commander and the secretary smiled sapiently, but gently.

“The Senor Comandante believes you, Dona Leonora:  the Senor Hurlstone is innocent of the piracy.  He is, of a surety, the leader of the Opposition.”

CHAPTER VIII.

In sanctuary.

When James Hurlstone reached the shelter of the shrubbery he leaned exhaustedly against the adobe wall, and looked back upon the garden he had just traversed.  At its lower extremity a tall hedge of cactus reinforced the crumbling wall with a cheval de frise of bristling thorns; it was through a gap in this green barrier that he had found his way a few hours before, as his torn clothes still testified.  At one side ran the low wall of the Alcalde’s casa, a mere line of dark shadow in that strange diaphanous mist that seemed to suffuse all objects.  The gnarled and twisted branches of pear-trees, gouty with old age, bent so low as to impede any progress under their formal avenues; out of a tangled labyrinth of figtrees, here and there a single plume of feathery palm swam in a drowsy upper radiance.  The shrubbery around him, of some unknown variety, exhaled a faint perfume; he put out his hand to grasp what appeared to be a young catalpa, and found it the trunk of an enormous passion vine, that, creeping softly upward, had at last invaded the very belfry of the dim tower above him; and touching it, his soul seemed to be lifted with it out of the shadow.