at Love will let us die--yet!" he said.

"That is a prayer. Amen!" said Concha, in a whisper, lifting her eyes to
his.

It was a strange betrothing, and little said. But when at last he put
the ox-goad in her hands, Concha knew that the night had indeed passed
away and that the morning was come.

CHAPTER XXXIX

A HANDFUL OF ROSES

Patiently and softly went the oxen about the little pottage garden of
the friars, till, where the soil was sandiest and the ground most open,
under a south-looking wall on which the roses were still clustering (for
they grow roses late at La Granja), lo! a trench was dug. It was not so
deep as a rich man's grave in other countries, but in Spain as elsewhere
a little earth covers a multitude of sorrows.

The long shallow trench had been the last work of the two remaining
monks ere they departed to their duty in the stricken village. Savage
men, heathen of heart and cruel of hand, might await them there. Black
plague would certainly lurk in every doorway. Yet these two brothers,
simple in the greatness of their faith--not of the wise of the land, not
of the apparent salt of the earth, but only plain devout men, ignorant
of all beyond their breviaries and their duty to their fellows--had gone
forth as quietly and unostentatiously as a labouring man shoulders his
mattock and trudges to his daily toil.

Of the three that remained, Brother Teodoro did his best; but in spite
of his endeavours the bulk of the work fell to Rollo and Concha. Yet
under the page's dress and the rude outer slough of tarred canvas the
girl's heart sang. There was nothing terrible in death when he and she
together lifted the spent stuff of mortality and laid it in its last
resting-place. Without a shudder she replaced a fallen face-cloth. With
Rollo opposite to her she took the feet of the dead that had guarded
them so well in the red morning light, and when all were laid a-row in
the rest which lasts till the Judgment Day, and before the first
spadeful of earth had fallen, Concha, with a sudden impulse, took a
kerchief from her neck, and plucked a double handful of the roses that
clustered along the wall. They were white roses, small, but of a sweet
perfume, having grown in that high mountain air. Then without a word,
and while the monk was still busy with his prayers for the dead, she
sprang down to where at the corner opposite to Brother Domingo the
daughter of Munoz had been laid, the pinched fierceness o