so by the singular beauty and
gentle deportment of his then newly-wed bride, whom he had wooed and won
in that holy land, sacred equally to the faith of Christian and of Jew.
The young Quexada did not long survive his return: his constitution
was broken by long travel, and the debility that followed his fierce
disease. On his deathbed he had besought the mother whom he left
childless, and whose Catholic prejudices were less stubborn than those
of his sire, never to forget the services a Jew had conferred upon him;
to make the sole recompense in her power--the sole recompense the Jew
himself had demanded--and to lose no occasion to soothe or mitigate the
miseries to which the bigotry of the time often exposed the oppressed
race of his deliverer. Donna Inez had faithfully kept the promise
she gave to the last scion of her house; and, through the power and
reputation of her husband and her own connections, and still more
through an early friendship with the queen, she had, on her return to
Spain, been enabled to ward off many a persecution, and many a charge
on false pretences, to which the wealth of some son of Israel made
the cause, while his faith made the pretext. Yet, with all the natural
feelings of a rigid Catholic, she had earnestly sought to render the
favor she had thus obtained amongst the Jews minister to her pious zeal
for their more than temporal welfare. She had endeavored, by gentle
means, to make the conversions which force was impotent to effect; and,
in some instances, her success had been signal. The good senora had thus
obtained high renown for sanctity; and Isabel thought rightly that she
could not select a protectress for Leila who would more kindly shelter
her youth, or more strenuously labor for her salvation. It was, indeed,
a dangerous situation for the adherence of the maiden to that faith
which it had cost her fiery father so many sacrifices to preserve and to
advance.

It was by little and little that Donna Inez sought rather to undermine
than to storm the mental fortress she hoped to man with spiritual
allies; and, in her frequent conversation with Leila, she was at once
perplexed and astonished by the simple and sublime nature of the belief
upon which she waged war. For whether it was that, in his desire
to preserve Leila as much as possible from contact even with Jews
themselves, whose general character (vitiated by the oppression which
engendered meanness, and the extortion which fostered