moist ashes and lampblack, so that they might
not appear to be Jewish daughters and should rather resemble slaves.
There were nights in which an uprising of the Moors was feared, an
invasion of the near-by Kabyles, excited in their fanaticism by the
inroads of European culture. The Moroccans burned the houses of the
Jews, plundered their treasures, fell like wild beasts upon the white
women of the infidels, decapitating them with hellish sadism after
subjecting them to atrocious outrages. Ah! Those childhood nights in
which she dozed standing, dressed like a beggar girl, since the
innocence of her tender age was of no avail as a protection!... Perhaps
it was these frights that were responsible for her dangerous
illness,--an illness that had brought her near to death, and to this
circumstance she owed her name Luna.

"At my birth I was named Horabuena, and a younger sister of mine
received the name Asibuena. After a period of terror and an invasion of
the Moroccans in which our house was burned down and we thought we were
all doomed to slaughter, my sister and I fell ill with fever. Asibuena
died; happily, I was saved."

And she described to Luis, who listened to her under a spell of horror,
the incidents of this exotic, abnormal life,--all the sufferings of her
mother in the poor house where they had taken refuge. Aboab's daughter
screamed with grief and tore her black hair before the bed where her
daughter lay overcome by the stupor of fever. Her poor Horabuena was
going to die.

"Ay, my daughter! My treasure Horabuena, my sparkling diamond, my nest
of consolation!... No more will you eat the tender chicken! No more will
you wear your neat slippers on Saturdays, nor will your mother smile
with pride when the Rabbi beholds you so graceful and beautiful!..."

The poor woman paced about the room lighted by a shaded lamp. In the
shadows she could detect the presence of the hated _Huerco_, the demon,
with a Spanish name who comes at the appointed hour to bear off human
creatures to the darkness of death. She must battle against the evil
one, must deceive the _Huerco_, who was savage yet stupid, just as her
forefathers had deceived him many a time:

She repressed her tears and sighs, calmed her voice, and stretching out
upon the floor spoke softly, with a sweet accent, as if she were
receiving an important visit:

"_Huerco_, what have you come for?... Are you looking for Horabuena?
Horabuena is not here; she has gone