ad talked till, at last exhausted, he sank back gently on the
pillows of the enormous bed emblazoned like a monument. I went out,
following a gray-headed negro, and the nun glided in, and stood at the
foot with her white hands folded patiently.

"Senor!" I heard her mutter reproachfully to the invalid.

"Do not scold a poor sinner, Dona Maria," he addressed her feebly, with
valiant jocularity. "The days are not many now."

The strangeness and tremendousness of what was happening came over me
very strongly whilst, in a large chamber with barred loopholes, I was
throwing off the rags in which I had entered this house. The night had
come already, and I was putting on some of Carlos' clothes by the many
flames of candles burning in a tall bronze candelabrum, whose three legs
figured the paws of a lion. And never, since I had gone on the road to
wait for the smugglers, and been choked by the Bow Street runners, had
I remembered so well the house in which I was born. It was as if, till
then, I had never felt the need to look back. But now, like something
romantic and glamorous, there came before me Veronica's sweet, dim
face, my mother's severe and resolute countenance. I had need of all her
resoluteness now. And I remembered the figure of my father in the big
chair by the ingle, powerless and lost in his search for rhymes. He
might have understood the romance of my situation.

It grew upon me as I thought. Don Balthasar, I understood, was apprised
of my arrival. As in a dream, I followed the old negro, who had
returned to the door of my room. It grew upon me in the silence of this
colonnaded court. We walked along the upper gallery; his cane tapped
before me on the tessellated pavement; below, the water splashed in the
marble basins; glass lanthorns hung glimmering between the pillars and,
in wrought silver frames, lighted the broad white staircase. Under the
inner curve of the vaulted gateway a black-faced man on guard, with
a bell-mouthed gun, rose from a stool at our passing. I thought I saw
Castro's peaked hat and large cloak flit in the gloom into which fell
the light from the small doorway of a sort of guardroom near the closed
gate. We continued along the arcaded walk; a double curtain was drawn to
right and left before me, while my guide stepped aside.

In a vast white apartment three black figures stood about a central
glitter of crystal and silver. At once the aged, slightly mechanical
voice of Don Balthasar ro