The night began to wane—the wind rose. It could
be heard shrilly to whistle through the crevices of the
rock, as if in threat and warning. But Maria slept

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not deeply, and her head was on the arm of the Maroon.
When he sought to rise, which more than once
he did, she started from her sleep with disquietude.
If he but stirred she was conscious of it. Her sleep
was troubled. Her dreams revenged upon her conscience
the obtuseness which, by the force of her will,
she imposed upon it in her waking moments. It
enabled her to restrain, though unconsciously, the
movements of her companion. He made repeated
attempts to disengage himself from her grasp—and
rise. He wished to confer with Amaya. We may
conjecture what he would have said. But he strove
in vain. In watching for the moment when the sleep
of Maria should become sufficiently deep to afford him
the desired opportunity, he finally slept himself. Nature
yielded at last, and his slumbers were soon quite
as profound as those of his companion.

Without being well conscious that he slept at all,
he was suddenly awakened, as if by a death-cold hand
upon his wrist. He started, and was confounded
when he unclosed his eyes, to behold the cavern brightly
illuminated. The fire which had been suffered to
go out by the Caribbean damsel, in the sweet experience
of her first mortal passion, had been suddenly
revived, and by her hands. She stood between him
and the altar-place, her eyes wildly sad and staring
upon him and his companion. A torch was still
grasped in one of her uplifted hands. She had probably
been inspecting closely the sleeping features of
the woman who had first taught her to feel the agony
which belongs to a consciousness of the infidelity of

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the beloved one. As, at his awakening, the head of
the Maroon was involuntarily uplifted, she cast the
brand which she held upon the altar, flung one of her
hands despairingly and reproachfully toward him, and
darted headlong from the chamber.