are for poor women! and we call ourselves Christians, but I
think we are fiends! Mercifully I had friends at court--some old
bell-ringers who had been in the Cathedral and who remembered the
gardener's widow. I wanted everything, even money, to get this unhappy
girl out of the devil's clutches."

The upper cloister was quite deserted. On arriving at the door of the
Lunas the girl seemed to wake up, and drew quickly back with a look
of terror, as though inside the "habitation" some great danger was
awaiting her.

"Go in, woman, go in," said the aunt; "it is your home. You had to
come back some time or other."

And she pushed her till she was through the door. Once inside the
sitting-room her tears ceased; she looked round with astonishment, no
doubt surprised at finding herself there. Her eyes examined everything
with a sort of stupefaction, as though marvelling that everything
should be in the same place as five years before, and with an
exactitude that made her doubt if such a long time had really elapsed.
Nothing seemed changed in that little world under the shadow of the
Cathedral. She only, who had left it in the bloom of her youth, now
returned aged and broken.

There was a long silence between the three people.

"Your room, Sagrario," said Gabriel at last gently, "is the same as
when you left it. Go in and do not come out till I call you. Be calm
and do not cry; trust me. You do not know me well, but the aunt will
have told you that I am interested in your fate. Your father will soon
be coming; hide yourself and be silent. I repeat it again, do not come
out till I call you."

When the old woman and her nephew were alone they could hear the
girl's suffocating sobs that burst out on seeing her old room.
Afterwards they heard a sound as though she were throwing herself on
the bed, and the violence of her grief seemed to become more and more
uncontrolled.

"Poor child!" said the old woman, who was very nearly crying also,
"she is good, and she has repented of her sins; if only her father had
sought her out when that rascal deserted her, what shame and misery
it would have spared her. And her health? I really think she is worse
than you are, Gabriel. Oh, those men! with their honour which is
nothing more than lies! What is honourable is to be charitable and
compassionate to others, and to harm no one. I said this the other
day when I was shocked at the shamelessness of my son-in-law, who
was furious at my go