with the fiery
impetuosity of his usual feelings.

As the canons entered the choir they walked with bent heads, looking
ashamed and frightened.

"Well, have you heard?" they said to one another as they disrobed in
the sacristy.

In a great hurry, with flying cloaks they all left the church, every
man his own way, without forming groups or circles, each one anxious
to free himself from all responsibility, and to appear free from all
complicity with the prelate's enemies.

The Tato laughed with joy seeing the sudden dispersion, and the
agitation of the gentlemen of the choir.

"Run! run I The old gossip will give you something to think about!"

The same preparations were made every year in the middle of August for
the festival of the Virgin del Sagrario. In the Cathedral they spoke
of this year's festival with mystery and anxiety, as though they were
expecting great events. His Eminence, who had not been into the church
for many months, in order not to meet his Chapter, would preside in
the choir on the feast day. He wished to see his enemies face to
face, crushed by his triumph, and to enjoy their looks of confused
submission. And accordingly, as the festival drew near many of the
canons trembled, thinking of the harsh and proud look the angry
prelate would fix on them.

Gabriel paid very little attention to these anxieties of the clerical
world; he led a strange life, sleeping the greater part of the
day, preparing himself for the fatiguing night watch, which he now
undertook alone. The Senor Fidel had fallen ill, and the Obreria to
avoid expense, and not to deprive the old man of his wretched pay, had
not engaged a new companion for him. He spent the nights alone in the
Cathedral as calmly as if he had been in the upper cloister, quite
accustomed to the grave-like silence. In order not to sleep, he read
by the light of his lantern any books he could get in the Claverias,
uninteresting treatises on history in which Providence played the
principal _role_; lives of the saints, amusing from their simple
credulity, bordering on the grotesque; and that family Quixote of the
Lunas', that he had so often spelt out when little, and in which he
still found some of the freshness of his childhood.

The Virgin's feast day arrived; the festival was the same as in
other years. The famous image had been brought out of its chapel and
occupied on its foot-board a place on the high altar. They brought out
her mantle kept in t