itter herbs to-day. But thus it happens sometimes
about Eastertide, though I love not such salads myself."

"Naturally. They are good for the blood," laughed Dom Diego, as his
eye caught Gabriel's. "And thou hast none, good dame."

There seemed almost a wink in the professorial eye, and the young
horseman smiled in good-natured response to the physician's estimate
of the jest.

"Then are the eaters sensible," he said.

"Ay, the only sensible people in Portugal," rejoined Dom Diego,
changing his speech to Latin, but retaining his smile. "And the only
good blood, Da Costa," he added, with what was now an unmistakable
wink. But this time Gabriel failed to see the point.

"The only good blood?" he repeated. "Dost thou then hold with the
Trappists that meat is an evil?"

A strange, startled look flashed across the physician's face, sweeping
off its ruddy hue, and though his smile returned on the instant, it
was as though forced back.

"In a measure," he replied. "Too much flesh generateth humors and
distempers in the blood. Hence Holy Church hath ordained Lent. She is
no friend to us physicians. _Adeos!_" and he ambled off on his mule,
waving the young horseman a laughing farewell.

But Gabriel, skirting the market, rode up the steep streets troubled
by a vague sense of a mystery, and later repeated the conversation to
a friar at the college.

III.

A week later he heard in the town that Dom Diego de Balthasar had been
arrested by the Inquisition for Judaism. The news brought him a more
complex thrill than that shock of horror at the treacherous
persistence of a pestilent heresy which it excited in the breast of
his fellow-citizens. He recalled to mind now that there were
thirty-four traces by which the bloodhounds of the Holy Office scented
out the secret Jew, and that one of the tests ran: "If he celebrates
the Passover by eating bitter herbs and lettuces." But the shudder
which the thought of the Jew had once caused him was, to his own
surprise, replaced by a secret sympathy. In his slowly-matured,
self-evolved scepticism, he had forgotten that a whole race had
remained Protestant from the first, rejecting at any and every cost
the corner-stone of the Christian scheme. And this race--he remembered
suddenly with a leap of the heart and a strange tingling of the
blood--had once been his own! The knowledge that had lurked in the
background of consciousness, like the exiled memory of an ancient
shame, sprang u