h some embers were smouldering, and L'Isle
placed two cork stools to raise their feet above the damp pavement of
flat stone. On the young friar's now coming forward (for with a
modesty rare in his order he had hitherto kept in the background),
L'Isle resumed his sociable conversation with him, and accepted the
proffered pinch of snuff, that olive-branch of the Portuguese. This
evidently had a good effect on their hosts; while Shortridge was
surprised to see the colonel, whose _hauteur_ he had himself felt,
demean himself by familiarity with these low people. He did not know
that a proud man, if his be generous pride, is apt to keep it for
those who assume superiority, or at least equality, with himself.

That was not the commissary's way. So he began to question abruptly,
in very bad Portuguese, as to the state of her larder, the elder
woman, who, ugly and blear-eyed, with ragged, scanty dress, and bare
feet, yet wore a necklace of beads and earrings of gold. She answered
tartly, that it being a fast-day, there was no flesh in the
house. They had _bacalhao_ and _sardinhas_, and garlic, and pepper,
and onions, and oil; and everything that Christians wanted on a
fast-day. She forgot to say that the house was without flesh many
more days than the church commands. L'Isle, with more address, applied
to the younger woman with better success, inquiring after
accommodations for the ladies. He so moved her that she snatched up
the only lamp in the room, and, leaving the rest of the party in the
growing darkness, ushered the ladies up the ladder, like stairs, to
the only two chambers where they could be private.

Shortridge, meanwhile, finding out the desolate state of the larder,
let the woman know that they had not come unprovided with a stock of
edibles of their own. He urged her to make preparations for cooking
it; so rousing the old man from his chimney corner, she carried him
out with her, and they soon returned with no small part of a
cork-tree; and when Lady Mabel and Mrs. Shortridge came down, a
cheerful blaze had brought out more fully the desolation of the room
in dispelling half its gloom.

"I trust you have found a habitable chamber over head," said L'Isle to
Lady Mabel.

"I were a heretic to complain," she answered. "It is true the room has
no window; but it has a square hole in the wall to let in the light
and let out the foul air. The bed is hard and not over tidy. But what
is wanting in cleanliness is made u