cannot track thy footsteps; I shall see thee no more on earth. I am
dying fast, but not of the wound I took from thee; let not that thought
darken thy soul, my husband! No, that wound is healed. Thought is
sharper than the sword. I have pilled away for the loss of thee and thy
love! Can the shadow live without the sun? And wilt thou never place
thy hands on my daughter's head, and bless her for her mother's sake?
Ah, yes--yes! The saints that watch over our human destinies will one
day cast her in thy way: and the same hour that gives thee a daughter
shall redeem and hallow the memory of a wife. . . . Leonarda has
vowed to be a mother to our child; to tend her, work for her, rear her,
though in poverty, to virtue. I consign these letters to Leonarda's
charge, with thy picture--never to be removed from my breast till the
heart within has ceased to beat. Not till Beatriz (I have so baptised
her--it was thy mother's name!) has attained to the age when reason can
wrestle with the knowledge of sorrow, shall her years be shadowed with
the knowledge of our fate. Leonarda has persuaded me that Beatriz shall
not take thy name of Nunez. Our tale has excited horror--for it is not
understood--and thou art called the murderer of thy wife; and the story
of our misfortunes would cling to our daughter's life, and reach her
ears, and perhaps mar her fate. But I know that thou wilt discover her
not the less, for Nature has a Providence of its own. When at last you
meet her, protect, guard, love her--sacred to you as she is, and shall
be--the pure but mournful legacy of love and death. I have done:
I die blessing thee!"
"INEZ."

Scarce had he finished those last words, ere the clock struck: it was the
hour in which the prince was to arrive. The thought restored Calderon to
the sense of the present time--the approaching peril. All the cold
calculations he had formed for the stranger-novice vanished now. He