ffins), posted two of the Riego negroes with loaded
muskets on guard before the door of my empty room, as if to protect me.

Then, just as dusk fell, Father Antonio, who had been praying silently
in a corner, got up, blew his nose, sighed, and suddenly enfolded me in
his powerful arms for an instant.

"I am an old man--a poor priest," he whispered jerkily into my ear, "and
the sea is very perfidious. And yet it favours the sons of your nation.
But, remember--the child has no one but you. Spare her."

He went off; stopped. "Inscrutable! inscrutable!" he murmured, lifting
upwards his eyes. He raised his hand with a solemn slowness. "An old
man's blessing can do no harm," he said humbly. I bowed my head. My
heart was too full for speech, and the door closed. I never saw him
again, except later on in his surplice for a moment at the gate, his
great bass voice distinct in the chanting of the priests conducting the
bodies.

The _Lugarenos_ would respect the truce arranged by the bishop.

No man of them but the three had entered the Casa. Already, early in the
night, their black-haired women, with coarse faces and melancholy eyes,
were kneeling in rows under the black _mantillas_ on the stone floor of
the cathedral, praying for the repose of the soul of Seraphina's
father, of that old man who had lived among them, unapproachable, almost
invisible, and as if infinitely removed. They had venerated him, and
many of them had never set eyes on his person.

It strikes me, now, as strange and significant of a mysterious human
need, the need to look upwards towards a superiority inexpressibly
remote, the need of something to idealize in life. They had only that
and, maybe, a sort of love as idealized and as personal for the mother
of God, whom, also, they had never seen, to whom they trusted to save
them from a devil as real. And they had, moreover, a fear even more real
of O'Brien.

And, when one comes to think of it, in putting on the long spectacled
robe of a Brother of Pity, in walking before the staggering bearers
of the great coffin with a tall crucifix in my hand, in thus taking
advantage of their truce of God, I was, also, taking advantage of what
was undoubtedly their honour--a thing that handicapped them quite as
much as had mine when I found myself unable to strike down O'Brien. At
that time, I was a great deal too excited to consider this, however. I
had many things to think of, and the immense necessity of keeping