nly from the next as sister differs from
sister. To those that dwelt in it, it was wholly apart from all the
world of man.

Most of its tall white houses with green doors were gathered about the
market-place, in which were pigeons and smells and declining sunlight,
as Rodriguez and his escort came towards it, and from round a corner at
the back of it the short, repeated song of one who would sell a
commodity went up piercingly.

This was all very long ago. Time has wrecked that village now.
Centuries have flowed over it, some stormily, some smoothly, but so
many that, of the village Rodriguez saw, there can be now no more than
wreckage. For all I know a village of that name may stand on that same
plain, but the Saint Judas-not-Iscariot that Rodriguez knew is gone
like youth.

Queerly tiled, sheltered by small dense trees, and standing a little
apart, Rodriguez recognised the house of the Priest. He recognised it
by a certain air it had. Thither he pointed and la Garda rode. Again he
spoke to them. "Can Morano speak Latin?" he said.

"God forbid!" said la Garda.

They dismounted and opened a gate that was gilded all over, in a low
wall of round boulders. They went up a narrow path between thick ilices
and came to the green door. They pulled a bell whose handle was a
symbol carved in copper, one of the Priest's mysteries. The bell boomed
through the house, a tiny musical boom, and the Priest opened the door;
and Rodriguez addressed him in Latin. And the Priest answered him.

At first la Garda had not realised what had happened. And then the
Priest beckoned and they all entered his house, for Rodriguez had asked
him for ink. Into a room they came where a silver ink-pot was, and the
grey plume of the goose. Picture no such ink-pot, my reader, as they
sell to-day in shops, the silver no thicker than paper, and perhaps a
pattern all over it guaranteed artistic. It was molten silver well
wrought, and hollowed for ink. And in the hollow there was the magical
fluid, the stuff that rules the world and hinders time; that in which
flows the will of a king, to establish his laws for ever; that which
gives valleys unto new possessors; that whereby towers are held by
their lawful owners; that which, used grimly by the King's judge, is
death; that which, when poets play, is mirth for ever and ever.

No wonder la Garda looked at it in awe, no wonder they crossed
themselves again: and then Rodriguez wrote. In the silence that
fo