Not for twenty years had Antonio set foot within a furlong of the stepping-stones. But José had obeyed his orders to the letter. A few gaps in the trees had been filled up, but otherwise nothing was changed. As he climbed the path the dull pounding of the tumbling water drowned the crooning of the stream at his feet, and at last he caught the silvery flash of the cascade through the trees, like a great fish struggling in a basket of reeds. And the flash of the cascade was not all Antonio saw. He saw as well a fine silver-gray cloak thrown down on a flat boulder; and standing beside it, a nun of the Order of the Visitation. VIII "I knew that you would come," said Isabel quietly as Antonio emerged from the bushes. "I knew I should find you here," Antonio answered, more quietly still. It seemed no more than a few feverish months since their parting. The boulder, the stepping-stones, the pool, the cascade, the rapids, the palms, the mimosas, the tree-ferns, the cypresses--all seemed unchanged. He raised his eyes and gazed steadily at Isabel. Time had not filched away her loveliness. Indeed, the nun's head-dress served even better than the golden ringlets of old to frame her beautiful features and to heighten both the blueness of her eyes and the whiteness of her brow. Like her father before her, she held herself as erect in middle-age as in youth. If some of the girlish bloom had gone, the loss was more than made good by new charms of womanly tenderness and Christian peacefulness. "You see I have kept my word," she said, speaking easily and quite naturally. "On the day we parted, did I not say that I would come back? I have come." "Yes," echoed Antonio, like a man in a dream. "You have come." "When you saw me," she added, with a smile, "perhaps you thought I had come to shoot you or to stab you; or to set the chapel on fire, bishops and abbots and all." Not for a moment had he lowered his gaze from her face. Merely to behold her again and to hear her voice, whatever her words might be, was happiness enough. The accord between them was so perfect that there was no need for questions, answers, news, explanations, reminiscences, plans, greetings, farewells. But she was waiting for him to speak; and at last, in the same dreamy tone as before, he pointed to her nun's dress and said: "This wonderful thing came to pass, did it not, on the eighth of July, twenty months after you went away? That day was the feast of Saint Isabel of Portugal. It was also the last day of a novena I had been making to this very end. On that day, as I sat in the chapel, I heard women's voices, far-off and sweet, chanting the Divine Office; and I knew that this miracle had come to pass." "You were not mistaken," she said, in low tones. "I awoke to my vocation on the eighth of July, the year but one after I left this place."