s as an image in a
church. The goats scattered like water poured on flat ground, and began
to crop stray blades of grass, invisible to any eyes but their own, amid
wastes of cracked earth and deserts of grey water-worn pebbles.

As she looked back, Sergeant Cardono was disappearing up among the
tumbled foot-hills and dry beds of winter torrents, which render the
lower spurs of the Guadarrama such a puzzle to the stranger, and such a
paradise for the smuggler and _guerrillero_. In another moment he had
disappeared. With a long quiet sigh La Giralda stole back to the
farmhouse. In spite of her race, and heathenish lack of creed, the spark
of humanity was far from dead in her bosom. The thought of the open eyes
of the little girl, which gazed even in death with fixed rapture upon
her wooden treasure, remained with her.

"The woman is as old as I--she can bide her time!" she muttered to
herself. "But the child--these arms are not yet so shrunken that they
cannot dig up a little earth to lay the babe thereunder."

And at the chamber door La Giralda paused. Like her people, she was
neither a good nor yet a bad Catholic. Consciously or unconsciously she
held a more ancient faith, though she worshipped at no shrine, told no
beads, and uttered no prayers.

"They have not been long dead," she said to herself, as she entered;
"the window is open and the air is sweet. Yet the plague, which snatches
away the young and strong, may look askance at old Giralda's hold on
life, which at the best is no stronger than the strength of a
basting-thread!"

Having said these words she advanced to the low trundle-bed, and,
softly crooning in an unknown tongue over the poor dead babe, she
lovingly closed its eyes, and taking a sheet from a wall-press that
stood partially open, she began to enwrap the little girl in its crisp
white folds. The Spaniards are like the Scottish folk in this, that they
have universally stores of the best and finest linen.

La Giralda was about to lay the wooden puppet aside as a thing of little
worth, but something in the clutch of the small dead hands touched and
troubled her. She altered her intention.

"No, you shall not be parted!" she said, "and if there be a resurrection
as the priests prate of--why, you shall e'en wake with the doll in your
arms!"

So the pair, in death not divided, were wrapt up together, and the gipsy
woman prepared to carry her light burden afield. But before doing so she
went to th