nnot be anything else,
and so I forgive them. But believe me, nephew, I often feel inclined
to laugh when I see the people kneeling before them. I believe in the
Virgin of the Sagrario, and a little in God; but in these gentlemen!
If you only knew them as I do! But, when all is said and done, we must
all live, and the evil is not in having faults, but in attempting to
hide them; playing a farce with the shamelessness of my son-in-law
who, here as you see him, is as proud as a castle, beats his breast,
kisses the ground like the Beatas,[1] and yet he is anxious for my
death, thinking I have something laid away in my chest; he filches
what he can from the Virgin's poor-box, steals the wax tapers, and
plays tricks with what is paid for masses, and yet he would be in
the street if it were not for me, who always think of my poor sick
daughter and my poor little grandchildren."

[Footnote 1: _Beata_--woman engaged in works of charity who wears the
religious habit.]

When Gabriel went down to see her in the garden, she always received
him with the same salutation:

"Hola, you ghost! but to-day you are looking better, you are being
patched up. I believe your brother will pull you through with all his
care."

And then followed a comparison between her healthy and vigorous old
age and his ruined youth, which was fighting so tenaciously against
death.

"Here you see my seventy years, and never an illness in all my life.
Summer and winter I never hear four o'clock strike in bed, and all my
teeth are as sound as in the days when Don Sebastian came in his red
dress as server in the church and wanted to steal half my breakfast.
You Lunas have always been delicate; your father, long before he was
my age, could barely walk, and was always complaining of rheum and of
the damp in this garden. Here am I in it constantly, and I feel just
the same as when I am upstairs in the Claverias. We, the Villalpandos,
are made of iron; for, of course, we are descended from that famous
Villalpando who made the screen of the high altar, the custodia, and
an innumerable quantity of other things. He really must have been a
giant, to judge by the ease with which he twisted and moulded every
sort of metal."

Gabriel's ill-health awoke in her the deepest compassion, but all the
same not quite free from malicious suggestions.

"How much you must have amused yourself about the world, eh, nephew?
But that war was your perdition; without it you would n