e bed. It was an ancient woman who lay thereon, clutching the
bed-clothes, and drawn together with the last agony. La Giralda gazed at
her a moment.

"You I cannot carry--it is impossible," she muttered; "you must take
your chance--even as I, if so be that the plague comes to me from this
innocent!"

Nevertheless, she cast another coverlet over the dead woman's face, and
went down the broad stairs of red brick, carrying her burden like a
precious thing. La Giralda might be no good Catholic, no fervent
Protestant, but I doubt not the First Martyr of the faith, the Preacher
of the Mount, would have admitted her to be a very fair Christian. On
the whole I cannot think her chances in the life to come inferior to
those of the astute Don Baltasar Varela, Prior of the Abbey of
Montblanch, or those of many a shining light of orthodoxy in a world
given to wickedness.

Down in the shady angle of the little orchard the old gipsy found a
little garden of flowers, geranium and white jasmine, perhaps planted to
cast into the rude coffin of a neighbour, _Yerba Luisa_, or lemon
verbena for the decoctions of a simple pharmacopoeia, on the outskirts
of these a yet smaller plot had been set aside. It was edged with white
stones from the hillside, and many coloured bits of broken crockery
decorated it. A rose-bush in the midst had been broken down by some
hasty human foot, or perhaps by a bullock or other large trespassing
animal. There were nigh a score of rose-buds upon it--all now parched
and dead, and the whole had taken on the colour of the soil.

La Giralda stood a moment before laying her burden down. She had the
strong heart of her ancient people. The weakness of tears had not
visited her eyes for years--indeed, not since she was a girl, and had
cried at parting from her first sweetheart, whom she never saw again. So
she looked apparently unmoved at the pitiful little square of cracked
earth, edged with its fragments of brown and blue pottery, and at the
broken rose-bush lying as if also plague-stricken across it, dusty,
desolate, and utterly forlorn. Yet, as we have said, was her heart by no
means impervious to feeling. She had wonderful impulses, this parched
mahogany-visaged Giralda.

"It is the little one's own garden--I will lay her here!" she said to
herself.

So without another word she departed in search of mattock and spade. She
found them easily and shortly, for the hireling servants of the house
had fled in haste