It was a footfall she had heard, the soft rattle of the rings as a hand drew aside the curtain that covered the opening into the outer cave.

She did not raise her face, she did not move! She could only lie there unable to breathe from the terror that seemed to paralyse her very thoughts.

Someone had come into the room!

And then she knew it was not the person she feared. The footfall was softer and more gentle. Skye opened her eyes.

An Indian girl stood there, her jet-black hair carefully braided on either side of her bronze-skinned young face with slanting sloelike eyes, which dropped shyly before the enquiry in Skye’s.

“I will bring food, señora,” she said in the soft slurring Spanish to which the Indians manage to give a lilting pronunciation all their own.

“Señora”, the word stabbed Skye like a physical wound. She was a married woman now and no longer addressed as ‘señorita’.

It made her shudder as if at some new horror.

“I don’t want any,” she tried to say, but the Indian girl had left the room.

Skye sat up in bed and looked at her watch. To her astonishment she saw that the hands pointed to nearly three o’clock. She must have slept from dawn until now.

A long time and yet it was not surprising that she had been exhausted for not only had the physical exertions of the day before been extremely strenuous but the emotions that she had experienced had also taken their toll.

Then, as she looked at her wristwatch, her eyes travelled to another piece of jewellery on the same hand – the ring on her third finger, the ring that El Diablo had put there.

For a moment Skye stared at it and then she pulled it from her finger and flung it with all her strength away from her. It hit one of the blue hangings and fell tinkling onto the wooden floor to lie there where she could still see it, glinting in the sunshine.

As she stared at it, hating all that it stood for and the man who had put it on her finger, she remembered how often she had sworn that she would never get married.

“I hate men!”

She had said that not once but dozens of times. She had vowed to herself that she would remain single, subservient to no man, a law unto herself – and yet now she had a husband!

And he was El Diablo, a murderer, a revolutionary – a Devil!

Skye put her hands up to her face and even as she did so she heard the Indian girl coming from the outer cave. She brought a tray and set it down beside the bed.

Skye wanted to refuse to eat anything and then she realised that she would need all her strength and all her intelligence to cope with the ordeals that lay ahead of her.