"Rosa! You are ill, you are weak--"
Her eyelids fluttered. "I am dying, O'Rail-ye. I only waited to see you."
"No, no!" In agony he gathered her once more into his arms.
"Oh yes!" Her bloodless fingers touched his face again, then his thin, worn rags. "You, too, have suffered. How came you to be so poor and hungry, O'Rail-ye?"
"I'm not poor, I'm rich. See!" He jingled the coins in his pocket. "That's money; money for you, sweet-heart. It will buy you food and medicine, it will make you well and strong again. Rosa, dear, I have looked for you so long, so long--" His voice broke wretchedly and he bowed his head. "I--I was afraid--"
"I waited as long as I had strength to wait," she told him. "It is too bad you came so late."
Once again she lapsed into the lethargy of utter weakness, whereupon he fell to stroking her hands, calling upon her to come back to him. He was beside himself now; a terrible feeling of impotence and despair overcame him.
Hearing some one speak, he raised his eyes and discovered at his side that figure of want which he had seen digging on the slope below. It was Evangelina. The negress was little more than skin and bones, her eyes were bleared and yellow and sunken, her face had grown ape-like, but he recognized her and she him.
"You are the American," she declared. "You are Rosa's man."
"Yes. But what is wrong with her? Look! She is ill--"
"She is often like that. It is the hunger. We have nothing to eat, senor. I, too, am ill--dying; and Asensio--Oh, you don't know how they have made us suffer."
"We must get Rosa home. Where do you live?"
Evangelina turned her death's head toward the city. "Down yonder. But what's the use? There is no food in our house and Rosa is afraid of those wagons. You know--the ones with the corpses. She made me bring her here to die."
The girl was not wholly unconscious, it seemed, for she stirred and murmured, faintly: "Those wagons! Don't let them put me in there with the other dead. They pile the bodies high--" A weak shudder convulsed her.
O'Reilly bent lower, and in a strong, determined voice cried: "You are not going to die. I have money for food. Rouse yourself, Rosa, rouse yourself."
"She prayed for you every night," the negress volunteered. "Such faith! Such trust! She never doubted that you would come and find her. Sometimes she cried, but that was because of her brother. Esteban, you know, is dead. Yes, dead, like all the rest."