For the first time Montoro Diego let his eyes fairly rest on his mentor's face. There was something so genuinely true in the ring of the voice that the boy's anger and indignation dwindled away he scarce knew how, and gave place to a growing trust. With an effort he crushed down his emotion as he replied in low tones: "I have no coward scruples against work, believe me. But I am noble, as you say. The son of one who died wrongfully for the death of Arbues de Epila. It was at the peril of their lives that any helped my mother, even with work, at the time that my father was thus barbarously mur--" Burgess Sancho sharply clapped his hand over the boy's mouth, muttering with half-angry solicitude: "Knowest thou not, my son, that a still tongue is wisdom? Keep thy information of the past for those who ask for it, and to those who do so give it not. You, a starving boy in the streets of El Cuevo, I can help. You may have dropped from the clouds for aught I know. Dost thou not comprehend me?" Montoro's dark eyes gleamed with a flitting smile. The Aragonese of those days were not wanting in intelligence. But at the same time his native pride, and even his nobility of character, forbade him to accept aught at the expense of his identity, and so he quickly let his new friend understand. "I have no inheritance but my father's name and my father's unsullied memory," he declared firmly; "and I will bear that openly. I have earned this loaf to-day, and more, by grinding colours for the great painter staying yonder; but first I told him who I was." "More foolish you," remarked Master Sancho, with a shrug. "But what said he to thy news?" "Even as thou--that I had more truth than wit. But he gave me work all the same, for he said that he need have no fear. The king could replace heretic nobles with other nobles, but he could not replace a painter, and so he would be wise enough to keep the one he had." "Ay, then," agreed Master Sancho, "the Señor is right; and if I were you I would turn painter also, for the royal ordinance of last September did not name that amongst the many things you may not be." "No," returned Montoro with a bitter laugh; "that last ordinance of persecution only excludes me from such employments as would be possible, not from those needing gifts vouchsafed only to the few. But I must say adios, for my mother will already have feared some mischance has come to me." "To our next meeting, then," said the worthy burgess. "And meantime I will cudgel my brains till I find some means to help you, for all you are so self-willed and impracticable, my son." The friendly look and the confident nod that accompanied these gruffly good-humoured words were full of such pleasant encouragement that Montoro Diego flew home with a heart suddenly grown as light as though he had already regained the power to use the title of 'Don' before his name, and had already won back the heritage of his ancestors.