“Will you sit with him for a moment, miss, while I fetch a cup of tea?” Evans asked in a low voice. “He won’t wake now, but in case he gets restless it’s best that someone should be close at hand.”

“Yes, I’ll sit with him,” Skye replied.

“I won’t be more than a few minutes, miss,” Evans promised.

He slipped away from the cabin and Skye sat down on the chair that he had left vacant.

El Diablo was breathing deeply and evenly. He looked younger and more vulnerable when he was asleep, she thought, and she could see now that he had not altered so very much from his photograph in the passport, taken when he was only a young boy. The lines from nose to mouth had deepened, his lips were set in a harder line and his chin was squarer. It was his expression that had changed most, she thought.

How hard she had fought him! And now, at the end of it all, what she wanted more than she had ever wanted anything in her life before was to feel his lips against hers.

She felt a sudden impatience with herself that so much time had been wasted. Why could she not have realised before that her fruitless struggling would end in love?

And then suddenly a cold hand clutched at her heart.

She could hear El Diablo’s voice saying,

“It’s the mawkish sentimentality that most women call love which I find intolerable.”

Skye put her hands up to her face. Was this what he meant? Was it this throbbing of her heart and the sudden dancing within her veins that he hated and despised?

Would she now become as undesirable and as unwanted as those other women, the women with whom he had taunted her so often, shaming and humiliating her because she must be continually reminded that they had been in the camp before her?

In a sudden terror she rose to her feet.

He could not mean that, he could not, and yet, as she looked down at him, impersonal in his unconsciousness, she knew that he had spoken the truth and that he had no use for love.

A pretty woman was a solace and a respite, an entertainment to which he could return in the evening, one who would for the moment take his mind off the innumerable problems and difficulties that beset him on every side. He wanted no more from her than that she should be lovely and excite his desires. He had no time for dramatics, as he called them, for the heart- searchings and the heart-breakings of tremendous emotions.

‘Oh, God! What am I to do?’

For the first time Skye saw the pit she had fallen into.