s
enamoured, deeply, fervently, and passionately enamoured of a myth, a
mental image of a man who had been dust these fifteen years. She mourned
him with a fond widow's mourning; prayed daily and nightly for the
repose of his soul, and in her exaltation waited now almost impatiently
for death that should unite her with him. Taking joy in the thought that
she should go to him a maid, she ceased at last to resent the maidenhood
that had been imposed upon her.

One day a sudden, wild thought filled her with a strange excitement.

"Is it so certain that he is dead?" she asked. "When all is said, none
actually saw him die, and you tell me that the body surrendered by
Mulai-Ahmed-ben-Mahomet was disfigured beyond recognition. Is it not
possible that he may have survived?"

The lean, swarthy face of Frey Miguel grew pensive. He did not
impatiently scorn the suggestion as she had half-feared he would.

"In Portugal," he answered slowly, "it is firmly believed that he lives,
and that one day he will come, like another Redeemer, to deliver his
country from the thrall of Spain."

"Then... then..."

Wistfully, he smiled. "A people will always believe what it wishes to
believe."

"But you, yourself?" she pressed him.

He did not answer her at once. The cloud of thought deepened on his
ascetic face. He half turned from her--they were standing in the shadow
of the fretted cloisters--and his pensive eyes roamed over the wide
quadrangle that was at once the convent garden and burial ground.
Out there in the sunshine amid the hum of invisible but ubiquitously
pulsating life, three nuns, young and vigorous, their arms bared to
the elbows, the skirts of their black habits shortened by a cincture of
rope, revealing feet roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and
mattock, digging their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of
the cloisters, within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de
Grado and Dona Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by King
Philip to an office as nearly akin to that of ladies-in-waiting as
claustral conditions would permit.

At length Frey Miguel seemed to resolve himself.

"Since you ask me, why should I not tell you? When I was on my way to
preach the funeral oration in the Cathedral at Lisbon, as befitted
one who had been Don Sebastian's preacher, I was warned by a person of
eminence to have a care of what I said of Don Sebastian, for not only
was he alive, but he would be