innocent as I am!"
The Commander and the secretary smiled sapiently, but gently.
"The Senor Comandante believes you, Dona Leonora: the Senor Hurlstone
is innocent of the piracy. He is, of a surety, the leader of the
Opposition."
CHAPTER VIII.
IN SANCTUARY.
When James Hurlstone reached the shelter of the shrubbery he leaned
exhaustedly against the adobe wall, and looked back upon the garden
he had just traversed. At its lower extremity a tall hedge of cactus
reinforced the crumbling wall with a cheval de frise of bristling
thorns; it was through a gap in this green barrier that he had found his
way a few hours before, as his torn clothes still testified. At one side
ran the low wall of the Alcalde's casa, a mere line of dark shadow in
that strange diaphanous mist that seemed to suffuse all objects. The
gnarled and twisted branches of pear-trees, gouty with old age, bent
so low as to impede any progress under their formal avenues; out of a
tangled labyrinth of figtrees, here and there a single plume of feathery
palm swam in a drowsy upper radiance. The shrubbery around him, of some
unknown variety, exhaled a faint perfume; he put out his hand to grasp
what appeared to be a young catalpa, and found it the trunk of an
enormous passion vine, that, creeping softly upward, had at last invaded
the very belfry of the dim tower above him; and touching it, his soul
seemed to be lifted with it out of the shadow.
The great hush and quiet that had fallen like a benediction on every
sleeping thing around him; the deep and passionless repose that seemed
to drop from the bending boughs of the venerable trees; the cool,
restful, earthy breath of the shadowed mold beneath him, touched only by
a faint jessamine-like perfume as of a dead passion, lulled the hurried
beatings of his heart and calmed the feverish tremor of his limbs. He
allowed himself to sink back against the wall, his hands tightly clasped
before him. Gradually, the set, abstracted look of his eyes faded and
became suffused, as if moistened by that celestial mist. Then he rose
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