er, they were alike in their pleasures and their
sorrows, and their common poverty had welded them into one will.
Moreover, Gabriel felt himself aged before his time by this life
of soul-stirring adventures and painful privations. He had been
imprisoned in many places in Europe, being suspected of complicity
with the terrorists, he had often been beaten by the police, and he
began to find a difficulty in travelling about the Continent, as his
photograph figured with that of several other "companions" in the
central police offices of the principal nations. He was a vagabond and
dangerous dog, who would end by being kicked out of every place.

Gabriel could not live alone; he was accustomed to see those kind blue
eyes near him, and to hear the caressing voice with its bird-like
inflexions which had so much encouraged him in times of trial and
difficulty, and he could not endure the solitude in a strange land
after Lucy's death. A great longing for his native land awoke in him,
he wished to return to Spain, to that land he had so often ridiculed,
and which now in spite of its backwardness seemed to him so
attractive. He thought of his brothers, fixed like plants to the
stones of the Cathedral, never interesting themselves with what took
place in the world, never seeking for news of him, as though they had
entirely forgotten him.

With a sudden impulse, as though he were afraid of dying away from
his native land, he returned to Spain. In Barcelona some of the
"companions" had obtained for him the management of a printing press,
but before taking up his post he wished to spend a few days in Toledo.
He returned an old man, though he was barely forty, speaking four or
five languages, and poorer than when he had left it. He found that
his brother the gardener had died, and that the widow and her son had
taken refuge in a garret in the Claverias, where she supported herself
by washing the canon's linen. Esteban, the "Wooden Staff," received
him with the same admiration he had felt for him while in the
seminary. He talked a great deal about his travels, gathering together
all the people in the upper cloister, so that they should listen to
this man who had travelled all over the world, just as though he were
going about his own house. In their inquiries they painfully entangled
geography, as they could only comprehend two divisions in it, the
countries of heretics, and the countries of Christians.

Gabriel pitied the great pove