letter I wrote in your uncle’s house?

“Not a word, Ricardo. All I had to tell me anything was the briar pipe you left there. Then I knew you were alive, and so I followed you. It was because I could not understand—because I had to find you—”

Her solemn demeanor perplexed him. She drew away and took a chair, her hands clasped, one little shoe tapping the rug. For his own part he had so much to explain that he burst out:

“No wonder you couldn’t understand. It is a long story, and I can give you only the first chapter of it now. That night when I failed to come back to the ship? You warned me to be careful, and so did old McClement, the chief engineer, but I had a grand opinion of myself. Colonel Fajardo decided to blow out my light. I annoyed him. His bravos bungled the job. They left me dead in the street, or so they thought.”

“Did Colonel Fajardo think so? Tell me, did he think he had killed you, Ricardo?” asked Teresa in a tense voice.

“He must have felt upset about it that night, because I wasn’t quite as dead as a mackerel. But I was supposed to die in jail where they threw me. So he must have been cheerful enough next morning. Did he show up at the ship before she sailed?”

Teresa’s body relaxed. A tremulous sigh fluttered from her lips before she said:

“Yes, Ricardo, he came down to the ship. I asked him and he lied to me. I knew he lied.”

Her eyes were so wistful, so profoundly tragic, that Ricardo, greatly mystified, clasped both her cold hands in one of his and forbore to break her silence. She was struggling with the temptation to withhold the secret from her lover, now that her justification had been vouchsafed. Why tarnish her fair name in his sight and perhaps repel him? Men were very jealous of the goodness of the women whom they truly loved. She fought down the temptation. Better to live without Ricardo than to live with a shadow between them. She was about to speak when Ricardo said, with visible embarrassment:

“It will never trouble me, but you ought to know. I can’t go back to Cartagena. I suppose you might call me a fugitive from justice. The world is big enough to get away from it, but I was not very gentle with Colonel Fajardo’s bravos. Two or three of them are not singing and playing the guitar any more. And there was a fight on Cocos Island, but that incident is closed. I can forget it all if you can, Teresa darling, but I have to confess to you.”

“You are a strong man who was fighting for his life, Ricardo,” firmly returned Teresa Fernandez. “And I am only a woman who saw her lover dead and knew there was no other way to punish the wicked one who had killed him. If you say I should go back to Cartagena and suffer the punishment of the law, I will go. You have only to say one little word. There is no more Colonel Fajardo. Do you understand?”

Richard Cary gazed at her in great pity and love and admiration. Who was he to judge? Had he not taken justice into his own hands when he had boarded Don Miguel O’Donnell’s schooner and courted fatal conflict? Had he slept any more uneasily for it? He had waged private war from the galleried streets of Cartagena to the palm-fringed bay of Cocos Island, like a roving Cary of Devon. Was there one law of justification for a man and another for a woman?

“If you believe in your heart that you did wrong and ought to pay for it, Teresa,” he slowly responded, “then we will go back to Cartagena together. You and I walk hand-in-hand from now on. But for the life of me, I can’t see it that way. Is it going to make you remorseful and unhappy? Mind, I go with you if it ought to be done.”

“Ricardo, I am not a bad woman,” she earnestly answered, “but I swear to you I feel no sorrow or shame. When it happened, I was willing and ready to pay the price, but it was not asked of me. And it was doing penance when I went back to Cartagena, just because I had to find out about you. What you have told me, that death did strike at you in the dark, is enough to make me at peace with myself and with God who must judge me. You know how you felt and what you said when you sailed across the Caribbean in the _Tarragona_, and saw my old city of Cartagena. It was just like you had lived and loved and fought there long ago. Perhaps it was that same Richard Cary that went to Cocos Island. And who knows but what I was another Teresa Fernandez, of the very long ago, that took it into her hands to punish the man who had killed her lover? If it had not been for her, there would have been no punishment for him at all. Does it make a difference, Ricardo, in what you think of me?”

“Only to make me love you more,” said Ricardo. “We are not going back to Cartagena. Life begins now. We have had enough of the past.”

“Then I can be happy,” smiled Teresa, but she also sighed. “If I have been wicked and must suffer for it, there is something that will tell me, and it is not my own conscience. Some day and somewhere, we will have a home, with a garden, Ricardo, and the galleon bell will hang there as it did in my uncle’s _patio_. It is a joyful bell now, for it has learned to ring good news. But if the day ever comes when Teresa hears it toll four bells for her, then she will know it is time for her to go. And she will go very gladly, for it will be enough, my precious, my splendid Ricardo, to have lived and loved with you.”