, it will all
come right. Then we are both young and can afford to wait."

We thought it a pity so interesting a conversation should be carried on
in a public thoroughfare, and at a tantalising distance, and offered
Sebastien five minutes' interval if he liked to go in and pay his
respects to his ladye-love. But he declined, and wafting a warm salute
to the fair vision of the casement, intimated he was again at our
service.

"She is the sweetest girl in Manresa," said Sebastien quite openly, "and
I am a lucky fellow to have won her. Unfortunately we are both poor. But
Anita is with a dressmaker, and will soon be able to start on her own
account: we shall not have much difficulty in getting on, if the padrone
will only advance me--as indeed I deserve."

We congratulated Sebastien upon his good fortune and wished him
promotion and success: and looking at his straight-forward open face, so
singularly free from guile, we thought the fair Anita was by no means to
be condoled with, however humble their prospects.

Then we made way into the upper part of the town, and presently
Sebastien turned into a chapel attached to a convent.

It was a small building of no pretension, but with a marvellous repose
and quietness about it. A screen divided the body of the church from the
altar, and immediately before the altar, separated from us by the
screen, was a strange and striking vision.

Two young girls who might have been some eighteen years old, knelt side
by side at the foot of the steps, motionless as carven images and
dressed in white. Their veils were thrown back, but their faces, turned
towards the altar, were invisible. Their posture was full of grace, and
their dress, whether by accident or design, was becomingly arranged and
fell in artistic folds. All the time we looked they moved neither hand
nor foot, and might have been, as we have said, carved in stone. We
almost felt as though gazing upon a vision of angels, so wonderfully did
the light fall upon them as they knelt: whilst in the body of the church
we were in semi-obscurity.

Presently a bell tinkled, a side door opened, and two other young girls
very much of the same age and dressed in exactly the same way, entered.
The two at the altar rose, made deep, graceful curtsies, and veiling
their faces, passed out of the chapel. Those who entered at once threw
back their veils. In the obscurity we were not observed. We had full
view of their charming faces, far too