The crowd held its breath and listened, amazed. There were tears in every eye, and every heart was swelled with emotion. The priest at the altar felt his hands tremble, for that which he held in them--that before which men and archangels bowed--was his God; and he thought he saw the heavens opened and the Host transfigured. After that the voices of the organ gradually grew fainter like a sound that dies as it is blown from echo to echo. Suddenly, the cry of a woman, a piercing, heart-rending cry, was heard in the organ-loft. The organ exhaled a strange discord, something like a sob, and was silent. The people rushed to the stairs, toward which the faithful, drawn from their religious ecstasy, had all turned their gaze. "What has happened? What is it?" whispered they; but nobody knew what to answer, and the confusion increased, threatening the good order and pious stillness proper to a church. "What has happened?" inquired the great ladies of the officer of justice, who, preceded by the beadles, had first penetrated into the organ-loft, and who now, pale and deeply distressed, was making his way to where the bishop awaited him, anxious like the rest of the congregation to learn the cause of the disturbance. "What has happened?" "Maese Pérez is dead!" And so it was. Those who first reached the organ-loft, jostling one another up the stairs, had found the poor organist, fallen face downwards on the keys of the old instrument, which was still vibrating; while his daughter, kneeling at his feet, was calling to him in vain with sobs and cries. III. "Good-evening, my Señora Doña Baltasara; are you here, too, for midnight Mass? For my part I had intended going to the parish, but you see how it is,--one goes where everybody goes. And yet, to tell you the truth, since Maese Pérez's death I feel as though there were a tombstone on my heart every time I enter Santa Inés. Poor dear man! Truly he was a saint. I have a little scrap of his doublet which I preserve like a relic, and which surely deserves it; for I believe, by my soul, that if the archbishop would only take a hand in the matter, our grandchildren would see him canonized. But why expect it? The dead and the absent have no friends. Novelty is what is in favor now,--you understand me, of course. What! You do not know what is going on? True, we are alike in that respect,--from our house to church, and from church back again, without inquiring into what is said or what is not said. However, on the wing, catching a word here, a word there, without the least interest in the matter, I sometimes happen to know the news.