with an agonised expression.
"If you cannot restore order, this will end badly; they even insult my
poor niece, and some day I shall turn half the people of the Claverias
out into the street, as I hold authority from His Eminence for
everything. Ay, senor! I do not know what has happened here; surely
the devil must have got loose in our upper cloister! How these people
have changed to me!"

Luna guessed Don Antolin's thoughts and his allusions to the devil who
had got loose in the cloister. That devil was himself. No doubt Silver
Stick was right. Without intending it he had introduced discord into
the Cathedral. He had sought calm and forgetfulness in that refuge,
and the spirit of rebellion had followed him even into this
concealment. He recalled his thoughts on the first day, when he was
alone in the silent cloister; he wished to be another stone in the
Cathedral, without thought, without feeling, to spend the rest of his
life fixed to that ruin, with the embryonic life of the fungus on the
buttress, but the spirit of the outside world had entered in with him.

Luna remembered how travellers in time of plague had crossed the
sanitary cordon--they were well and happy, nothing betrayed the
infection in their bodies; but the poisonous germs travelled in the
folds of their clothes and in their hair, carrying death without
knowing it, helping it to leap all barriers and obstacles, without
being in the least aware of it. He was the same, but instead of
spreading death, he spread tumultuous and rebellious life. The protest
of the lower orders that had been surging throughout the world, for
more than a century, had entered with him into this still remaining
fragment of the sixteenth century. He had awakened those men, who had
been like the sleepers in the legend, motionless in their cave for
ages, while the centuries rolled on and the world was transformed.

The awakening of these people was sudden and violent, like that of a
people in revolution. They were ashamed of the old errors that they
had worshipped, and this made them receive as gospel everything that
was new, without quailing before the consequences.

It was the faith of a people which, once it takes form, rushes
onwards, accepting everything, justifying everything, the only
requirement being its novelty, and casting aside contemptuously those
traditional principles which it had just abandoned.

The cowardly submission of Silver Stick was the first victory of t