Only the Mother of Sorrows can help me." It was a miserable sequence to the happy night, and Antonia was really terrified at the position in which she found herself.

If the Americans should fall, nothing but flight, or uncompromising submission to Fray Ignatius, remained for her.

She knew only too well how miserable her life could be made; what moral torture could be inflicted; what spiritual servitude exacted.

In a moment of time she had comprehended her danger, and her heart sank and sickened with a genuine physical terror.
The cold was still severe, and no one answered her call for wood.

Isabel crouched, white and shivering, over the dying embers, and it was she who first uttered the fear Antonia had refused to admit to herself--"Suppose the servants are forbidden to wait upon us!" "I will bring wood myself, dearest." She was greatly comforted by the word "us." She could almost have wept for joy of the sympathy it included.