'For shame,' I said. 'Do you then think that love can be frightened away
by some few scars?'

'Yes,' Otomie answered, 'that is the love of a man; not such love as
mine, husband. Had I been thus--ah! I shudder to think of it--within a
year you would have hated me. Perhaps it had not been so with another,
the fair maid of far away, but me you would have hated. Nay, I know it,
though I know this also, that I should not have lived to feel your hate.
Oh! I am thankful, thankful.'

Then I left her for a while, marvelling at the great love which she had
given me, and wondering also if there was any truth in her words, and
if the heart of man could be so ungrateful and so vile. Supposing that
Otomie was now as many were who walked the streets of Tenoctitlan that
day, a mass of dreadful scars, hairless, and with blind and whitened
eyeballs, should I then have shrunk from her? I do not know, and I thank
heaven that no such trial was put upon my constancy. But I am sure of
this; had I become a leper even, Otomie would not have shrunk from me.

So Otomie recovered from her great sickness, and shortly afterwards the
pestilence passed away from Tenoctitlan. And now I had many other
things to think of, for the choosing of Guatemoc--my friend and blood
brother--as emperor meant much advancement to me, who was made a general
of the highest class, and a principal adviser in his councils. Nor did
I spare myself in his service, but laboured by day and night in the work
of preparing the city for siege, and in the marshalling of the troops,
and more especially of that army of Otomies, who came, as they had
promised, to the number of twenty thousand. The work was hard indeed,
for these Indian tribes lacked discipline and powers of unity, without