Rosa meditated much upon the contrast between her present and her former condition.  Matanzas was the city of her birth, and time was when she had trod its streets in arrogance and pride, when she had possessed friends by the score among its residents.  But of all these there was not one to whom she dared appeal in this, her hour of need.  These were harsh times; Spanish hatred of the revolutionists was bitter, and of the Cuban sympathizers none were left.  Moreover, Esteban’s denouncement as a traitor had estranged all who remained loyal to the crown, and so far as Rosa herself was concerned, she knew that it would not matter to them that she had cleaved to him merely from sisterly devotion:  by that act she had made herself a common enemy and they would scarcely sympathize with her plight.  The girl had learned only too well what spirit was abroad.  But even had she felt assured of meeting sympathy, her pride was pure Castilian, and it would never down.  She, a Varona, whose name was one to conjure with, whose lineage was of the highest!  She to beg?  The thing was quite impossible.  One crumb, so taken, would have choked her.  Rosa preferred to suffer proudly and await the hour when hunger or disease would at last blot out her memories of happy days and end this nightmare misery.

Then, too, she dreaded any risk of discovery by old Mario de Castano, who was a hard, vindictive man.  His parting words had shown her that he would never forgive the slight she had put upon him; and she did not wish to put his threats to the test.  Once Rosa saw him, on her way to buy a few centavos’ worth of sweet-potatoes; he was huddled in his victoria, a huge bladder of flesh, and he rode the streets deaf to the plaints of starving children, blind to the misery of beseeching mothers.  Rosa shrank into a doorway and drew her tattered shawl closer over her face for fear Don Mario might recognize in this misshapen body and in these pinched, discolored features the beauteous blossom he had craved.

Nor did she forget Colonel Cobo.  The man’s memory haunted her, asleep and awake; of him she was most desperately afraid.  When for the first time she saw him riding at the head of his cutthroats she was like to swoon in her tracks, and for a whole day thereafter she cowered in the hut, trembling at every sound.

In these dark hours she recalled the stories of the old Varona treasure and Esteban’s interesting theory of its whereabouts, but she could not bring herself to put much faith in either.  At the time of her brother’s recital she had been swayed by his conviction, but now on cooler thought a dozen explanations of Dona Isabel’s possession of that doubloon offered themselves, no one of which seemed less probable than Esteban’s.  Of course it was barely possible that there was indeed a treasure, and even that Esteban’s surmise had been correct.  But it was little more than a remote possibility.  Distance lends a rosy color of reality to our most absurd imaginings, but, like the haze that tints a far-off landscape, it dissolves upon approach.  Now that Rosa was here, in sight of the ruined quinta itself, her hopes and half-beliefs faded.