e got her on the
right side of the door."

"We'll have a go at the business together," said Dick. "It would be more
sociable."

"All right, thank you," said I. "Then something's settled; and these best
of friends can go home and sleep."

"Sleep!" echoed Pilar scornfully. "Oh, if I were a man, and could do
_something_ to punish the Duke!"

"I wish you could set your bull at him," said Dick. "Only, now I think of
it, it's _his_ bull still."

Try as we might, it was impossible to persuade either Colonel O'Donnel or
Pilar that they ought to return quietly to bed, if not to sleep. No, they
would do nothing of the kind. Besides, no properly disposed person within
ten miles of Seville would lie in bed that night. Processions would go on
till early morning. Many people would watch them, or spend the hours till
early mass in prayer in the cathedral, which would be open all night. Why
should not the O'Donnel family do as others did?

There was no answer to this; and it was finally arranged that, if they
wished to rest at all, it should be at the hotel in the Plaza de San
Fernando, where we had dined. That was to be the rendezvous; and the
Cherub would engage the verger we knew to watch the Duke's house in the
morning, bringing news of our fate to the hotel--if we did not bring it
ourselves.

Never--if I live beyond the allotted threescore years and ten--shall I
forget that strange night of Holy Thursday in Seville.

Dick and I wandered through the streets, and in the Plaza de la
Constitucion, where electric lamps and moonlight mingled bleakly, while
never-ending _cofradias_ passed.

A sky of violet was like a veil of silky gauze, and as the moon slid down
the steeps of heaven the vast dome paled. One by one the stars went out
like spent matches; dawn was on its way. Electric lights flared and died,
leaving a pearly dusk more mysterious than any twilight which falls with
night.

The crowds had thinned; but silent brotherhoods moved through streets
where there was no other sound than the rustling of their feet, the tap of
their leaders' silver batons. So faint was the dawn-dusk, that they were
droves of shadows on their way back into night, their candle-lights lost
stars. Now and then the clink of a baton brought to some half-shuttered
window a face, to be presently joined by other faces, peering down at the
dark processions of men and black-robed, penitent women.

Outside the great east door of the cathedral halted a