The Secret Power

She clasped her hands and lifted them in an attitude of prayer, laying them against Morgana's breast.

"You will let me have my way--surely you will?" she pleaded--"You are a little angel of mercy, unlike any other woman I ever saw--so white and pure and sweet!--you understand it all! In his dreadful weakness and loneliness, God gives him to ME!--happy me, who am young and strong enough to care for him and attend upon him. I have no money,--perhaps he has none either, but I will work to keep him,--I am clever at my needle--I can embroider quite well--and I will manage to earn enough for us both." Her voice broke in a sob, and Morgana, the tears falling from her own eyes, drew her into a close embrace.

And she murmured plaintively again-"His wife!--I must be his wife,--his serving-woman--then no one can forbid me to be with him! You will find some good priest to say the marriage service for us and give us God's benediction--it will mean nothing to him, because he cannot know or understand,--but to me it will be a holy sacrament!"

Then she broke down and wept softly till the pent-up passion of her heart was relieved, and Morgana, mastering her own emotion, had soothed her into quietude. Leaning back from her arm-chair where she had rested since rising from her bed, she looked up with an anxious appeal in her lovely eyes.

"Let me tell you something before I forget it again"--she said--"It is something terrible--the earthquake."

"Yes, yes, do not think of it now"--said Morgana, hastily, afraid that her mind would wander into painful mazes of recollection--"That is all over."

"Ah, yes! But you should know the truth! It was NOT an earthquake!" she persisted--"It was not God's doing! It was HIS work!"

And she indicated by a gesture the next room where Roger Seaton lay.

A cold horror ran through Morgana's blood. HIS work!--the widespread ruin of villages and townships,--the devastation of a vast tract of country--the deaths of hundreds of men, women and little children--HIS work? Could it be possible? She stood transfixed,--while Manella went on-"I know it was his work!" she said--"I was warned by a friend of his who came to 'la Plaza' that he was working at something which might lose him his life. And so I watched. I told you how I followed him that morning--how I saw him looking at a box full of shining things that glittered like the points of swords,--how he put this box in a case and then in a basket, and slung the basket over his shoulder, and went down into the canon, and then to the cave where I found him. I called him--he heard, and held up a miner's lamp and saw me!--then--then, oh, dear God!--then he cursed me for following him,--he raised his arm to strike me, and in his furious haste to reach me he slipped on the wet, mossy stones. Something fell from his hand with a great crash like thunder--and there was a sudden glare of fire!--oh, the awfulness of that sound and that flame!--and the rocks rose up and split asunder--the ground shook and broke under me--and I remember no more--no more till I found myself here!--here with you!"