s the son of a more
unfortunate father; but the name that he used was not that of his
house. His father, it seems----" but Manvers stopped him.

"Excuse me--I don't care about his father or his names. Tell me
anything more that the girl had to say."

"I have told you everything, senor caballero," said Fray Juan; "and I
will only add that you are not to suppose that I am violating the
confidences of God. Far from that. She made no confession in the true
sense, though she promised me that she would not fail to do so at the
earliest moment. I had it urgently from herself that I should seek you
out with her tale, and rehearse it to you. In justice to her, I am now
to ask you if it is true, so far as you are concerned in it?"

Manvers replied, "It's perfectly true. I found her in bad company at
Palencia; a pack of ruffians was about her, and she might have been
killed. I got her out of their hands, knocked about and wounded, and
brought her so far on the road to the first convent I could come at.
That poor devil there overtook us about a league from the wood. She
had nothing to say to him, nor he to her, but I remember noticing that
she didn't seem happy after he had joined us. He had been her lover, I
suppose?"

"She gave me to understand that," said Fray Juan gravely. Manvers here
started at a memory.

"By the Lord," he cried, "I'll tell you something. When we got to the
wood I wanted to bathe in the river, and was going to leave those two
together. Well, she was in a taking about that. She wanted to come
with me--there was something of a scene." He recalled her terror, and
Esteban's snarling lip. "I might have saved all this--but how was I to
know? I blame myself. But what puzzles me still is why the man should
have wanted my life. Can you explain that?"

Fray Juan was discreet. "Robbery," he suggested, but Manvers laughed.

"I travel light," he said. "He must have seen that I was not his game.
No, no," he shook his head. "It couldn't have been robbery."

Fray Juan, I say, was discreet; and it was no business of his.... But
it was certainly in his mind to say that Esteban need not have been the
robber, nor Manvers' portmanteau the booty. However, he was silent,
until the Englishman muttered, "God in Heaven, what a country!" and
then he took up his parable.

"All countries are very much the same, as I take it, since God made
them all together, and put man up to be the master of them, and