breath if Don Andres de Fonseca would
consent to see her privately on a matter of some importance, and I would
fix an hour then and there. Had it not been for me such patients would
have been lost to us, since, for the most part, their timidity had kept
them away.

In the same fashion when the festival was ended and I prepared to wend
homewards, now and again a gallant would slip his arm in mine and ask
my master's help in some affair of love or honour, or even of the purse.
Then I would lead him straight to the old Moorish house where Don Andres
sat writing in his velvet robe like some spider in his web, for the most
of our business was done at night; and straight-way the matter would
be attended to, to my master's profit and the satisfaction of all. By
degrees it became known that though I was so young yet I had discretion,
and that nothing which went in at my ears came out of my lips; that I
neither brawled nor drank nor gambled to any length, and that though I
was friendly with many fair ladies, there were none who were entitled to
know my secrets. Also it became known that I had some skill in my art of
healing, and it was said among the ladies of Seville that there lived no
man in that city so deft at clearing the skin of blemishes or changing
the colour of the hair as old Fonseca's nephew, and as any one may know
this reputation alone was worth a fortune. Thus it came about that I was
more and more consulted on my own account. In short, things went so well
with us that in the first six months of my service I added by one third
to the receipts of my master's practice, large as they had been before,
besides lightening his labours not a little.

It was a strange life, and of the things that I saw and learned, could
they be written, I might make a tale indeed, but they have no part in
this history. For it was as though the smiles and silence with which men
and women hide their thoughts were done away, and their hearts spoke to
us in the accents of truth. Now some fair young maid or wife would come
to us with confessions of wickedness that would be thought impossible,
did not her story prove itself; the secret murder perchance of a spouse,
or a lover, or a rival; now some aged dame who would win a husband in
his teens, now some wealthy low-born man or woman, who desired to buy an
alliance with one lacking money, but of noble blood. Such I did not care
to help indeed, but to the love-sick or the love-deluded I listened