he great stained-glass
rose-window suspended by a miracle of art above the centre doorway; for
upon that side the exposure permits of the display of lacework in stone
and of other beauties peculiar to the style improperly called Gothic.

The larger part of the nave and aisles was left for the townsfolk, who
came and went and heard mass there. The choir was shut off from the
rest of the church by a grating and thick folds of brown curtain, left
slightly apart in the middle in such a way that nothing of the choir
could be seen from the church except the high altar and the officiating
priest. The grating itself was divided up by the pillars which supported
the organ loft; and this part of the structure, with its carved wooden
columns, completed the line of the arcading in the gallery carried by
the shafts in the nave. If any inquisitive person, therefore, had been
bold enough to climb upon the narrow balustrade in the gallery to look
down into the choir, he could have seen nothing but the tall eight-sided
windows of stained glass beyond the high altar.

At the time of the French expedition into Spain to establish Ferdinand
VII once more on the throne, a French general came to the island after
the taking of Cadiz, ostensibly to require the recognition of the King's
Government, really to see the convent and to find some means of
entering it. The undertaking was certainly a delicate one; but a man of
passionate temper, whose life had been, as it were, but one series of
poems in action, a man who all his life long had lived romances instead
of writing them, a man pre-eminently a Doer, was sure to be tempted by a
deed which seemed to be impossible.

To open the doors of a convent of nuns by lawful means! The metropolitan
or the Pope would scarcely have permitted it! And as for force or
stratagem--might not any indiscretion cost him his position, his whole
career as a soldier, and the end in view to boot? The Duc d'Angouleme
was still in Spain; and of all the crimes which a man in favour with the
Commander-in-Chief might commit, this one alone was certain to find him
inexorable. The General had asked for the mission to gratify private
motives of curiosity, though never was curiosity more hopeless. This
final attempt was a matter of conscience. The Carmelite convent on the
island was the only nunnery in Spain which had baffled his search.

As he crossed from the mainland, scarcely an hour's distance, he felt a
presentiment tha