,
and of his savings that were devoted to usury--loans that never went
beyond two or three duros to the poorer servants of the church ground
down by poverty, and which he recovered with interest at the beginning
of every month when they were paid by the Canon Obrero. In him avarice
and usury were joined to the most implicit honesty in regard to the
interests of the church; he would punish relentlessly the smallest
pilfering in the sacristy, and he made up his accounts for the Chapter
with a minuteness that annoyed the Obrero. To every one his own, the
church was poor and it would be a sin worthy of hell to deprive her of
a single farthing; he, as a good servant of God was poor also, and he
thought he was doing no wrong in drawing a certain profit from the
money he had gathered together by dint of bargaining, and by many
painful privations in the midst of his poverty.

His niece, Mariquita, lived with him, an ugly woman with masculine
features and a fresh colour, who had come from the mountains to look
after her uncle, of whose riches and power in the Primacy all his
relations and friends in the village talked a great deal. She rode
roughshod over all the other women in the Claverias, taking undue
advantage of Don Antolin's supreme authority. The more timid formed
round her a circle of adulation, endeavouring to evoke her protection
by cleaning her house and cooking for her, while Mariquita, dressed in
the habit, and with her hair most carefully combed--the only luxury
allowed by her uncle--loitered about the cloister hoping to meet there
some cadet, or that some of the foreigners visiting the tower or the
hall of the giants would take notice of her. She made sheep's eyes
at every man; and she, so hard and imperious to all the women, would
smile sweetly on all the bachelors living in the Claverias. The "Tato"
was a great friend of hers; he would come and visit her when her uncle
was absent in order to air his graces as apprentice to a Torrero.
Gabriel, with his delicate looks, his mysterious self-containment, and
the confused story of all his great travels about the world interested
her not less; she would even speak with marked deference to the
"Wooden Staff," as he was both a man and a widower, and, as the
"Perrero" wickedly said, the very sight of a pair of trousers nearly
drove the poor woman mad in that establishment where the greater part
of the men wore petticoats.

Don Antolin had known Gabriel since his childh