“Did he say when he would come back?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Never! He said he would never set foot in Temecula again.”
“Does she know him well?”
“As well as her own brother.”
What more could Felipe ask? With a groan, wrung from the very depths of his heart, he tossed the man a gold-piece; another to the woman. “I am sorry,” he said. “Alessandro was my friend. I wanted to see him;” and he rode away, Carmena's eyes following him with a covert gleam of triumph.
When these last words of his were interpreted to her, she started, made as if she would run after him, but checked herself. “No,” she thought. “It may be a lie. He may be an enemy, for all that. I will not tell. Alessandro wished not to be found. I will not tell.”
And thus vanished the last chance of succor for Ramona; vanished in a moment; blown like a thistledown on a chance breath,—the breath of a loyal, loving friend, speaking a lie to save her.
Distraught with grief, Felipe returned home. Ramona had been very ill when she left home. Had she died, and been buried by the lonely, sorrowing Alessandro? And was that the reason Alessandro was going away to the North, never to return? Fool that he was, to have shrunk from speaking Ramona's name to the Indians! He would return, and ask again. As soon as he had seen his mother, he would set off again, and never cease searching till he had found either Ramona or her grave. But when Felipe entered his mother's presence, his first look in her face told him that he would not leave her side again until he had laid her at rest in the tomb.
“Thank God! you have come, Felipe,” she said in
