old of the cloths that seemed almost as
good now as on the day when they were woven, and lifted them,
revealing beneath the figures of a man and woman. The features were
unrecognizable, although the hair, white in the man's case and raven
black in that of the woman, remained perfect. They had been great
people, for orders glittered upon the man's breast, and his sword was
gold hilted, whilst the woman's bones were adorned with costly necklaces
and jewels, and in her hand was still a book bound in sheets of
silver. Benita took it up and looked at it. It was a missal beautifully
illuminated, which doubtless the poor lady had been reading when at
length she sank exhausted into the sleep of death.

"See the Lord Ferreira and his wife," said the Molimo, "whom their
daughter laid thus before she went to join them." Then, at a motion from
Benita, he covered them up again with their golden cloths.

"Here they sleep," he went on in his chanting voice, "a hundred and
fifty and three of them--a hundred and fifty and three; and when I dream
in this place at night, I have seen the ghosts of every one of them
arise from beside their forms and come gliding down the cave--the
husband with the wife, the child with the mother--to look at me, and
ask when the maiden returns again to take her heritage and give them
burial."

Benita shuddered; the solemn awfulness of the place and scene oppressed
her. She began to think that she, too, saw those ghosts.

"It is enough," she said. "Let us be going."

So they went, and the pitiful, agonized Christ upon the cross, at which
she glanced from time to time over her shoulder, faded to a white blot,
then vanished away in the darkness, through which, from generation to
generation, it kept its watch above the dead, those dead that in their
despair once had cried to it for mercy, and bedewed its feet with tears.

Glad, oh! glad was she when she had left that haunted place behind her,
and saw the wholesome light again.

"What have you seen?" asked her father and Meyer, in one breath, as they
noted her white and frightened face.

She sank upon a stone seat at the entrance of the cave, and before she
could open her lips the Molimo answered for her:

"The maiden has seen the dead. The Spirit who goes with her has given
greeting to its dead that it left so long ago. The maiden has done
reverence to the White One who hangs upon the cross, and asked a
blessing and a pardon of Him, as she whose Spirit