er was hurt and asked me what had happened. This
gave me my opportunity, which I was not slow to take.

'Have you patience to listen to a story?' I said, 'for I would seek your
help.'

'Ah!' he answered, 'it is the old case, the physician cannot heal
himself. Speak on, nephew.'

Then I sat down by the bed and told him all, keeping nothing back. I
told him the history of my mother and my father's courtship, of my own
childhood, of the murder of my mother by de Garcia, and of the oath
that I had sworn to be avenged upon him. Lastly I told him of what had
happened upon the previous night and how my enemy had evaded me. All the
while that I was speaking Fonseca, wrapped in a rich Moorish robe, sat
up in the bed holding his knees beneath his chin, and watching my face
with his keen eyes. But he spoke no word and made no sign till I had
finished the tale.

'You are strangely foolish, nephew,' he said at length. 'For the most
part youth fails through rashness, but you err by over-caution. By
over-caution in your fence you lost your chance last night, and so by
over-caution in hiding this tale from me you have lost a far greater
opportunity. What, have you not seen me give counsel in many such
matters, and have you ever known me to betray the confidence even of the
veriest stranger? Why then did you fear for yours?'

'I do not know,' I answered, 'but I thought that first I would search
for myself.'

'Pride goeth before a fall, nephew. Now listen: had I known this history
a month ago, by now de Garcia had perished miserably, and not by your
hand, but by that of the law. I have been acquainted with the man from
his childhood, and know enough to hang him twice over did I choose to
speak. More, I knew your mother, boy, and now I see that it was the
likeness in your face to hers that haunted me, for from the first it was
familiar. It was I also who bribed the keepers of the Holy Office to let
your father loose, though, as it chanced, I never saw him, and arranged
his flight. Since then, I have had de Garcia through my hands some four
or five times, now under this name and now under that. Once even he came
to me as a client, but the villainy that he would have worked was too
black for me to touch. This man is the wickedest whom I have known in
Seville, and that is saying much, also he is the cleverest and the most
revengeful. He lives by vice for vice, and there are many deaths upon
his hands. But he has never prospered in his