ering this oaf." Then he spoke aloud. "Ah, Ramon, back already!
We thought you had been buying beeves in the Cerdagne. I suppose the
little Dolores dragged you back. Ho, ho, you young married men! Your
hearts make fools of your feet. 'Tis only celibacy, that most sacred and
wise institution of Holy Mother Church, that can preserve man his
liberty--certainly, Manuela, I will put away my snuff-box, I was not
aware that it was in my hand! And I will _not_ drop any more on my new
soutane, which indeed, as you say, I had no business to be wearing on an
ordinary day."

While Don Mateo thus spoke, and, talking all the time, moved lightly for
so gross a man to and fro on his verandah, Manuela with a quick hitch of
her muffling mantilla about the lower part of her face, took her way
swiftly up the village street.

"This way, Ramon--this way! A plague take those spider-legged chairs.
They are all set crosswise in the way of an honest man's feet. Manuela
keeps all so precise, nothing is ever left where it would be most
convenient. Not that she is not the best of souls, our good Manuela and
a pearl of price--a very Martha in the house, a woman altogether above
rubies! Is she quite gone? Sit you down then, Ramon, here is the
wine-skin, under the seat to the left, and tell me of your journey,
speaking at ease as man to man. This is no confessional, which reminds
me, sirrah, that you have not come to your duty since Easter. Ah, again
the married man! 'He minds the things of his wife,' saith the holy
apostle, in my opinion very justly."

Ramon had seated himself on a chair at one corner of the priest's
verandah--a deep screen of leaves was over them. The mosquitoes and
gnats danced and lit, hummed and bit, but neither the priest nor yet
Ramon minded them in the least. They were men of Sarria, bred of the
reed-fenced villages of the Aragonese border, blooded by the
grey-backed, white-bellied mosquitoes which took such sore toll alike of
the stranger within the wall, and through the skin of the Proselyte of
the Gate.

But as the priest boomed forth his good-humoured gossip in a voice
monotonous and soothing as the _coo-rooing_ of a rock pigeon, suddenly
there rose out of the tangle of roses and vine leaves behind him, an
evil thing against which Don Ramon's birthright gave him no immunity. It
stung and fled.

"Go home, fool!" hissed a voice in his ear, as he sat silent and
spellbound in the dusk, "go home, shamed one. Your wife is