deliver a message at the house of his sometime friend Don Luis
Fernandez.

When he arrived at the bottom of the valley through which the waters of
the Cerde had almost ceased to flow, being so drained for irrigation and
bled for village fountains that there remained hardly enough of them to
be blued by the washerwomen at their clothes, or for the drink of the
brown goats pattering down to the stray pools, their hard little hoofs
clicking like castanets on the hot and slippery stones of the river-bed.
Meanwhile El Sarria thought several things.

First, that Luis Fernandez had recovered from his wound and was so sure
of his own security that he could afford to take over his friend's wife
and all her responsibilities. Ramon gritted his teeth, as he stole like
a shadow down the dry river-bed. He had learned many a lesson during
these months, and the kite's shadow flitted not more silently over the
un-peopled moor than did El Sarria the outlaw down to the old
mill-house. He knew the place, too, stone by stone, pool by pool, for in
old days Luis and he had often played there from dawn to dark.

The mill-house of Sarria was in particularly sharp contrast to the abode
he had left. Luis had always been a rich man, especially since his
uncle died; he, Ramon, never more than well-to-do. But here were
magazines and granaries, barns and drying-lofts. Besides, in the
pleasant angle where the windows looked down on the river, there was a
dwelling-house with green window-shutters and white curtains, the like
of which for whiteness and greenness were not to be seen even within the
magnificent courtyard of Senor de Flores, the rich alcalde of Sarria.

This was illuminated as Ramon came near, and, from the darkness of the
river gully, he looked up at its lighted windows from behind one of the
great boulders, which are the teeth of the Cerde when the floods come
down from the mountains. How they rolled and growled and groaned and
crunched upon each other! Ramon, in all the turmoil of his thoughts,
remembered one night when to see Dolores and to stand all dripping
beneath her window, he had dared even that peril of great waters.

But all was now clear and bright and still. The stars shone above and in
nearly every window of the mill-house there burned a larger, a mellower
star. It might have been a _festa_ night, save that the windows were
curtained and the lights shone through a white drapery of lace, subdued
and tender.

He crept n