birds that flew away above the City towards the distant mountains drop
down to their nests in Seville ere the darkness came. This last evening
but one was intensely hot; the town at their feet seemed drowning in a
dust of gold. Cries, softened and made utterly musical, rose up to them
from this golden world, beyond which the sky reddened as the sun sank
lower. Sometimes they heard the jingling bells of mules and horses in
the hidden streets; they saw the pigeons circling above the house-tops,
and doll-like figures moving whimsically in gardens that seemed as small
as pocket-handkerchiefs. Thin laughter of playing children stole to
them. And then the huge and veiled voice of the Cathedral bell tolled
the hour, like Time become articulate.

A voice may have an immense influence over a sensitive nature. This bell
of the Cathedral of Granada has one of the most marvellous voices in the
world, deep with a depth of old and vanished ages, heavy with the burden
of all the long-dead years, and this evening it seemed suddenly to
strike away a veil from Catherine's husband. She was leaning her arms on
the painted railing and searching the toy city with her happy eyes.
Mark, standing behind her, was solicitously winding a shawl round her to
protect her from the chill that falls from the Sierra Nevada with the
dropping downward of the sun. As the bell tolled, Catherine felt that
Mark's hands slipped from her shoulders. She glanced round and up at
him. He was standing rigid. His eyes were widely opened. His lips were
parted. All the gaiety that usually danced in his face had disappeared.
He looked like an entranced man.

"Mark!" Catherine exclaimed. "Mark! why, how strange you look!"

"Do I?" he said, staring out over the wide plain below.

The voice of the bell died reluctantly on the air, but some huge and
vague echo of its heavy romance seemed to sway, like a wave, across the
little houses to the sunset and faint towards Seville.

"Yes, you look sad and stern. I have never seen your face like
this--till now."

He made no answer.

"Are you sad because we are going so soon?" she asked. "But then why
should we go? We are perfectly happy here. There is nothing to call us
away."

"Kitty, does not that bell give you the lie?" he answered.

"The bell of the Cathedral?" she asked, wondering.

"Yes. Just now when I listened to it, I seemed to hear it whispering of
the mysterious things of life, of the hidden currents in the grea