such a portentous miracle. Rafael had followed the party into the
shrine and taken a position near the fascinating stranger. She, however,
pretended not to see him.

"That is only a legend," he ventured to remark, when the rustic had
finished his story. "You understand, of course, that nobody hereabouts
accepts such tales as true."

"I suppose so," the lady answered coldly.

"Legend or no legend, don Rafael," the recluse grumbled, somewhat
peeved, "that's what my grandfather and all the folk of his day used to
say; and that's what people still believe. If the story has been handed
down so long, there must be something to it."

The patch of sunlight that shone through the doorway upon the flagstones
was darkened by the shadow of a woman. It was a poorly clad orchard
worker, young, it seemed, but with a face pale, and as rough as wrinkled
paper, all the crevices and hollows of her cranium showing, her eyes
sunken and dull, her unkempt hair escaping from beneath her knotted
kerchief. She was barefoot, carrying her shoes in her hand. She stood
with her legs wide apart, as if in an effort to keep her balance. She
seemed to feel intense pain whenever she stepped upon the ground.
Illness and poverty were written on every feature of her person.

The recluse knew her well; and as the unfortunate creature, panting with
the effort of the climb, sank upon a little bench to rest her feet, he
told her story briefly to the visitors.

She was ill, very, very ill. With no faith in doctors, who, according to
her, "treated her with nothing but words"; she believed that the Virgin
_del Lluch_ would ultimately cure her. And, though at home she could
scarcely move from her chair and was always being scolded by her husband
for neglecting the housework, every week she would climb the steep
mountain-side, barefoot, her shoes in her hand.

The hermit approached the sick woman, accepting a copper coin she
offered. A few couplets to the Virgin, as usual, he supposed!

"Visanteta, a few _gochos_!" shouted the rustic, going to the door. And
his daughter came into the chapel--a dirty, dark-skinned creature with
African eyes, who might just have escaped from a gipsy band.

She took a seat upon a bench, turning her back upon the Virgin with the
bored ill-humored expression of a person compelled to do a dull task day
after day; and in a hoarse, harsh, almost frantic voice, which echoed
deafeningly in that small enclosure, she began a drawling c