yful delicacy of her mouth, I saw how a
consciousness of fascination had served to lend new powers of pleasing.

She spoke to me of her widowhood without any affectation of feeling
grieved or sorry. So long as Don Geloso had lived, her existence had
been like that of a nun in a cloister; he was too jealous to suffer her
to go into the world, and, save at the Court Chapel each morning and
evening, she never saw anything of that brilliant society in which her
equals were moving. When her uncle was created Bishop of Seville, she
removed to that city to visit him, and had never seen her husband after.
Such, in few words, was the story of a life, whose monotony would have
broken the spirit of any nature less buoyant and elastic than her own.
Don Estaban was dead; and of him she spoke with deep and affectionate
feeling; betraying besides that her own lot was rendered almost a
friendless one by the bereavement.

That same evening, as we walked through the rooms, examining pictures
and ancient armor, of which our host was somewhat vain, I learned the
secret to which the Senhora had alluded at table, and divesting which
of all the embarrassment the revelation occasioned herself, was briefly
this: The Fra, who had never, for some reasons of his own, either liked
or trusted me, happened to discover some circumstances of my earlier
adventures in Texas, and even traced me in my rambles to the night of my
duel with the Ranchero. Hence he drew the somewhat rash and ungenerous
conclusion that my character was not so unimpeachable as I affected, and
that my veracity was actually open to question! An active correspondence
had taken place between Don Geloso and himself about me, in which the
former, after great researches, pronounced that no noble family of my
name had existed in Old Spain, and that, in plain fact, I was nothing
better than an impostor! In this terrible delusion the old gentleman
died; but so fearful was he of the bare possibility of injuring one in
whose veins flowed the pure blood of Castile that on his death-bed he
besought the Bishop to ascertain the fact to a certainty, and not
to desist in the investigation till he had traced me to my birth,
parentage, and country. Upon this condition he had bequeathed all his
fortune to the Church, and not alone all his own wealth, but all Donna
Maria's also.

The Bishop's visit to Ireland, therefore, had no other object than to
look for my baptismal certificate,--an investigatio