“Yes!  Go on.”

“There are ornaments, too.  God knows they must have come from heaven, they are so beautiful; and pearls from the Caribbean as large as plums.”

“Are you speaking the truth?”

“Every peso, every bar, every knickknack I have handled with my own hands.  Did I not make the hiding-place all alone?  Senora, everything is there just as I tell you—­and more.  The grants of title from the crown for this quinta and the sugar-plantations, they are there, too.  Don Esteban used to fear the government officials, so he hid his papers securely.  Without them the lands belong to no one.  You understand?”

“Of course!  Yes, yes!  But the jewels—­God! where are they hidden?”

“You would never guess!” Sebastian’s voice gathered strength.  “Ten thousand men in ten thousand years would never find the place, and nobody knows the secret but Don Esteban and me.”

“I believe you.  I knew all the time it was here.  Well?  Where is it?”

Sebastian hesitated and said, piteously, “I am dying—­”

Isabel could scarcely contain herself.  “I’ll give you water, but first tell me where—­where!  God in heaven!  Can’t you see that I, too, am perishing?”

“I must have a drink.”

“Tell me first.”

Sebastian lifted his head and, meeting the speaker’s eyes, laughed hoarsely.

At the sound of his unnatural merriment Isabel recoiled as if stung.  She stared at the slave’s face in amazement and then in fury.  She stammered, incoherently, “You—­you have been—­lying!”

“Oh no!  The treasure is there, the greatest treasure in all Cuba, but you shall never know where it is.  I’ll see to that.  It was you who sold my girl; it was you who brought me to this; it was your hand that whipped me.  Well, I’ll tell Don Esteban how you tried to bribe his secret from me!  What do you think he’ll do then?  Eh?  You’ll feel the lash on your white back—­”

“You fool!” Dona Isabel looked murder.  “I’ll punish you for this; I’ll make you speak if I have to rub your wounds with salt.”

But Sebastian closed his eyes wearily.  “You can’t make me suffer more than I have suffered,” he said.  “And now—­I curse you.  May that treasure be the death of you.  May you live in torture like mine the rest of your days; may your beauty turn to ugliness such that men will spit at you; may you never know peace again until you die in poverty and want—­”

But Dona Isabel, being superstitious, fled with her fingers in her ears; nor did she undertake to make good her barbarous threat, realizing opportunely that it would only serve to betray her desperate intentions and put her husband further on his guard.  Instead she shut herself into her room, where she paced the floor, racking her brain to guess where the hiding-place could be or to devise some means of silencing Sebastian’s tongue.  To feel that she had been overmatched, to know that there was indeed a treasure, to think that the two who knew where it was had been laughing at her all this time, filled the woman with an agony approaching that which Sebastian suffered from his flies.