inkled. "Good, sir, good. We go. I show you
Manuela all-holy like a nun. I know whata she do. Look for 'eaven all
day. That Chucha she tell me something--and the _portero_, 'e damgood
fellow."

Resplendent in white duck trousers, Mr. Manvers was remarked upon by a
purely native company of sightseers. Quick-eyed ladies in mantillas
were there, making play with their fans and scent-bottles; attendant
cavaliers found something of which to whisper in the cool-faced
Englishman with his fair beard, blue eyes, and eye-glass, his air of
detachment, which disguised his real feelings, and of readiness to be
entertained, which they misinterpreted.

The facts were that he was painfully involved in Manuela's fate, and
uncomfortably near being in love again with the lovely unfortunate.
She was no longer a pretty thing to be kissed, no longer even a
handsome murderess; she was become a heroine, a martyr, a thing enskied
and sainted.

He had seen more than he had been meant to see during his ordeal in the
Audiencia--her consciousness of himself, for instance, as revealed in
that last dying look she had given him, that long look before she
turned and followed her gaolers out of court. He guessed at her
agonies of shame, he understood how it was that she had courted it; in
fine, he knew very well that her heart was in his keeping--and that's a
dangerous possession for a man already none too sure of the whereabouts
of his own.

When the organ music thrilled and opened, and the Recogidas filed
in--some hundred of them--his heart for a moment stood still, as he
scanned them through the gloom. They were dressed exactly alike in
dull clinging grey, all wore close-fitting white caps, were nearly all
dead-white in the face. They all shuffled, as convicts do when they
move close-ordered to their work afield.

It shocked him that he utterly failed to identify Manuela--and it
brought him sharply to his better senses that Gil Perez saw her at
once. "See her there, master, see there my beautiful," the man groaned
under his breath, and Manvers looked where he pointed, and saw her; but
now the glamour was gone. Gil was her declared lover. The Squire of
Somerset could not stoop to be his valet's rival.

The Squire of Somerset, however, observed that she held herself more
stiffly than her co-mates, and shuffled less. The prison garb clothed
her like a weed; she had the trick of wearing clothes so that they
draped the figure, not