.

"He has not," said I, turning upon my guide, who stood apart with a
baffling smile, "as yet done me the honour to reciprocate my weak
confidences."

Captain Alan too stared at him. "Are you a priest, sir?" he demanded.

He was answered by a bow. "You didn't know it?" cried I. "It's the one
thing he has allowed me to discover."

"But I understood that you were a scholar, sir--"

"The two callings are not incompatible, I hope?"

"--of the University of Salamanca: a Doctor, too. My memory is yet
weak, but surely I had it from your own lips that you were a Doctor?"

"--of Moral Philosophy," the old man answered with another bow.
"Of the College of the Conception--now, alas! destroyed."

"The care with which you have tended me, sir, has helped my mistake: and
now my gratitude for it must help my apologies. I fear I have, from
time to time, allowed my tongue to take many liberties with your
profession."

"You have, to be sure, been somewhat hard with us."

"My prejudice is an honest one, sir."

"Of that there can be no possible doubt."

"But it must frequently have pained you."

"Not the least in the world," the old Doctor assured him, almost with
_bonhomie_. "Besides, you were suffering from sunstroke."

My kinsman eyed him; and I could have laughed to watch it--that gaze
betrayed a faint expiring hope that, after all, his diatribes against
the Scarlet Woman had shaken the Doctor--upon whom (I need scarcely say)
they had produced about as much effect as upon the rock of Rueda itself.
And I think that, though regretfully, he must at length have realised
this, for he sank back on the pillow again with a gentle weariness in
every line of his Don Quixote face.

"Ah, yes, from sunstroke! My cousin"--here he turned towards me--"this
gentleman--or, as I must now learn to call him, this most reverend
Doctor of Philosophy, Gil Gonsalvez de Covadonga--found me some days ago
stretched unconscious beside the highroad to Tordesillas, and in two
ways has saved my life: first, by conveying me to this hiding-place, for
the whole _terrain_ was occupied by Marmont's troops, and I lay there in
my scarlet tunic, a windfall for the first French patrol that might
pass; and, secondly, by nursing me through delirium back to health of
mind and strength of body."

"The latter has yet to come, Senor Capitano," the Doctor interposed.

And I: "My cousin, your distaste for disguise will yet be the death of
you. But tell me