another protector."

"But _they--they_ have gone?"

"The Lutheran dogs have gone, and have taken the city's victuals with
them."

"I do not want to live, my friend."

"Granted: but I do not think that Juanito, here, is quite of your
mind."

She considered for a moment. "I will go with you," she said: and we
quitted the _patio_ together.

The gate opened upon a narrow alley, encumbered now with charred beams
and heaps of refuse from a burnt house across the way. The fury of the
pirates had been extravagant, but careless (as Felipe had said). In
their lust of robbing, firing, murdering, they had followed no system;
and so it happened that a few houses, even wealthy ones, stood intact,
like islands, in the general ruin. For the most part, to be sure,
there were houses which hid their comfort behind mean walls. But once
or twice we were fairly staggered by the blind rage which had passed
over a mansion crowded with valuables and wrecked a dozen poor
habitations all around it. The mischief was that from such houses
Felipe, our forager, brought reports of wealth to make the mouth
water, but nothing to stay the stomach. The meat in the larders was
putrid; the bread hard as a stone. We were thankful at last for a few
oranges, on which we snatched a breakfast in an angle of ruined wall
on the north side of the Cathedral, pricking up our ears at the baying
of the dogs as they hunted their food somewhere in the northern
suburbs.

I confess that the empty houses gave me the creeps, staring down at me
with their open windows while I sucked my orange. In the rooms behind
those windows lay dead bodies, no doubt: some mutilated, some swollen
with the plague (for during a fortnight now the plague had been busy);
all lying quiet up there, with the sun staring in on them. Each window
had a meaning in its eye, and was trying to convey it. "If you could
only look through me," one said. "The house is empty--come upstairs
and see." For me that was an uncomfortable meal. Felipe, too, had lost
some of his spirits. The fact is, we had been forced to step aside to
pass more than one body stretched at length or huddled in the roadway,
and--well, I have told you about the dogs.

Between the Cathedral and the quays scarcely a house remained: for the
whole of this side of the city had been built of wood. But beyond this
smoking waste we came to the great stone warehouses by the waterside,
and the barracks where the Genoese traders lodged