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his family.

"Do you know that house?" I inquired at last, pointing to the
residencia, for I readily wearied of any talk that kept me from the
thought of Olalla.

He looked at me darkly and crossed himself.

"Too well," he said, "it was there that one of my comrades sold himself
to Satan; the Virgin shield us from temptations! He has paid the price;
he is now burning in the reddest place in hell!"

A fear came upon me; I could answer nothing; and presently the man
resumed, as if to himself: "Yes," he said, "O yes, I know it. I have
passed its doors. There was snow upon the pass, the wind was driving it;
sure enough there was death that night upon the mountains, but there was
worse beside the hearth. I took him by the arm, Senor, and dragged him
to the gate; I conjured him, by all he loved and respected, to go forth
with me; I went on my knees before him in the snow; and I could see he
was moved by my entreaty. And just then she came out on the gallery, and
called him by his name; and he turned, and there was she, standing with
a lamp in her hand and smiling on him to come back. I cried out aloud to
God, and threw my arms about him, but he put me by, and left me alone.
He had made his choice; God help us. I would pray for him, but to what
end? there are sins that not even the Pope can loose."

"And your friend," I asked, "what became of him?"

"Nay, God knows," said the muleteer. "If all be true that we hear, his
end was like his sin, a thing to raise the hair."

"Do you mean that he was killed?" I asked.

"Sure enough, he was killed," returned the man. "But how? Ah, how? But
these are things that it is sin to speak of."

"The people of that house ..." I began.

But he interrupted me with a savage outburst. "The people?" he cried.
"What people? There are neither men nor women in that house of Satan's!
What? have you lived here so long, and never heard?" And here he put his
mouth to my ear and whispered, as if even the fowls of the mountain
might have overheard and been stricken with horror.

What he told me was not true, nor was it even original; being, indeed,
but a new edition, vamped up again by village ignorance and
superstition, of stories nearly as ancient as the race of man. It was
rather the application that appalled me. In the old days, he said, the
Church would have burned out that nest of basilisks; but the arm of the
Church was now shortened; his friend Miguel had been unpunished by the
hands