u must
remember it is very heavy work for an invalid."

"Do not let that trouble you," said Don Antolin resolutely; "you will
be at least ten inside the car, and I have chosen all strong men; you
would go to complete the number, and I should recommend you to accept
in order to earn a little."

"Then we will clench the business, Don Antolin; you may reckon on me,
I am always ready to earn a day's wage whenever it turns up."

His great wish to get out of the Cathedral had finally decided him,
his wish once more to walk through the streets of Toledo, that he had
not seen during his seclusion in the cloister, and without anyone
being able to take notice of him. Besides, the ironical situation
tickled him extremely, that he of all men with his round religious
denials should be the one to pilot the God of Catholicism through the
devout crowd.

This spectacle made him smile, possibly it was a symbol; certainly
Wooden Staff would greatly rejoice, he would look upon it as a small
triumph for religion, that obliged His enemies to carry Him on their
shoulders. But he himself would look upon it in a different way;
inside the eucharistic car he would represent the doubt and denials
hidden in the heart of worship, splendid in its exterior pomp, but
void of faith and ideals.

"Then we are agreed, Don Antolin. I will come down shortly into the
Cathedral."

They parted, and Gabriel, after quietly digesting the milk his niece
brought him, went down into the Cathedral without saying a word to
anyone about the work he intended carrying out; he was afraid of his
brother's objections.

In the lower cloister he again met Silver Stick, who was talking to
the gardener's widow, showing her contemptuously a bunch of wheat ears
tied with a red ribbon. He had found it in the holy water stoup by the
Puerta del Alegria. Every year on the day of Corpus he had found the
same offering in the same place; an unknown had thus dedicated to the
Church the first wheat of the year.

"It must be a madman," said the priest. "What is the good of this?
What does this bunch mean? If at least it had been a cart of sheaves
as in the good old times of the tenths!"

And while he threw the ears with contempt into a flower border in the
garden, Gabriel thought with delight of the atavic force which had
resuscitated in a Catholic church, the pagan offering: the homage to
the divinity of the firstfruits of the earth fertilised by the spring.

The choir was en