THE TWO CAPTAINS.
Page: 38

like the dust clouds of the desert.

Even now, at times, when he would fall asleep after the midday meal,
and Antonia and Heimbert would watch his slumbers like two smiling
angels, he would suddenly start up and gaze round him with a
terrified air, and then it was not till he had refreshed himself by
looking at the two friendly faces that he would sink back again into
quiet repose. When questioned on the matter, after he was fully
awake, he told them that in his wanderings nothing had been more
terrible to him than the deluding dreams which had transported him,
sometimes to his own home, sometimes to the merry camp of his
comrades, and sometimes into Zelinda's presence, and then leaving him
doubly helpless and miserable in the horrible solitude as the
delusion vanished. It was on this account that even now waking was
fearful to him, and even in sleep a vague consciousness of his past
sufferings would often disturb him. "You cannot imagine it," he
added. "To be suddenly transported from well-known scenes into the
boundless desert! And instead of the longed-for enchanting face of
my beloved, to see an ugly camel's head stretched over me
inquisitively with its long neck, starting back as I rose with still
more ugly timidity!"

This, with all other painful consequences of his past miseries, soon
wholly vanished, from Fadrique's mind, and they cheerfully set out on
their journey to Tunis. The consciousness, indeed, of his injustice
to Heimbert and its unavoidable results often lay like a cloud upon
the noble Spaniard's brow, but it also softened the natural proud
severity of his nature, and Antonia could cling the more tenderly and
closely to him with her loving heart.

Tunis, which had been before so amazed at Zelinda's magic power and
enthusiastic hostility against the Christians, now witnessed
Antonia's solemn baptism in a newly-consecrated edifice, and soon
after the three companions took ship with a favorable wind for
Malaga.




CHAPTER XVII.



Beside the fountain where she had parted from Heimbert, Dona Clara
was sitting one evening in deep thought. The guitar on her knees