with him where the humiliation of her social position would be less known.
Aklao established himself at San Felipe, capital of the province of Aconcagua, where he became a merchant, and lived respectably; but the unfortunate pair were condemned to suffer the inevitable consequences of their false position, and the church which he had repudiated, would not quietly see him in the arms of another mistress. The curé Espinosa threatened to send him to Santiago to the tender mercies of the order he had abandoned, and finally forced him to remove to Mendoza, his native place, and carry there the scandal of his unlawful union. The church is ever bitter against those who have left her for social positions. If the monk Aldao could have married lawfully, perhaps his passions might have been moderated by the pleasures of home, and he might have been saved from the crimes of his after-life.
On recrossing the Andes, his reflections must have been strange, and anything but pleasant, for the mountain ridge which separated two provinces, was also a dividing line between the two phases of his existence: on one side he had been the chaplain,—the Dominican friar;—on the other, he Yas the Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Aldao, with an unwedded wife at his side. The people of Mendoza, who had been accustomed to see him with gown and rosary, would now see him with sword and epaulets, and women and children would point mockingly at "the Fraile," a name which came to be a more painful wound than any received in battle. He avoided society, and secretly nourished a sort of hatred for all mankind, which was the more bitter because suppressed.
