“Hush, brother,” said young Pedro, confidentially, “say it not so loudly. I did tell the Infidel that I was Ruy Diaz of Bivar, the Cid Campeador--and he did believe me.” And then the cavalry laughed louder than ever, and swooping down captured the young crusaders and set the truants before them on their uncomfortable Cordova saddles. Then, turning around, they rode swiftly back to Avila with the runaways, while the old Moor, glad to have escaped rough handling from the Christian riders, grasped his staff and plodded on toward Avila and Valladolid. So the expedition for martyrdom and crusade came to an ignominious end. But the pious desires of little Theresa did not. For, finding that martyrdom was out of the question, she proposed to her ever-ready brother that they should become hermits, and for days the two children worked away trying to build a hermitage near their father’s house. But the rough and heavy pieces of granite with which they sought to build their hermitage proved more than they could handle, and their knowledge of mason-work was about as imperfect as had been their familiarity with crusading and the country of the Moors. “The stones that we piled one upon another,” wrote Theresa herself in later years, “immediately fell down, and so it came to pass that we found no means of accomplishing our wish.” The pluck and piety, however, that set this conscientious and sympathetic little girl to such impossible tasks were certain to blossom into something equally hard and unselfish when she grew to womanhood. And so it proved. Her much-loved but romance-reading mother died when she was twelve years old, and Theresa felt her loss keenly. She was a very clever and ambitious girl, and with a mother’s guiding hand removed she became impatient under the restraints which her stern old father, Don Alphonso, placed upon her. At sixteen she was an impetuous, worldly-minded, and very vain though very dignified young lady. Then her father, fearful as to her future, sent her to a convent, with orders that she should be kept in strict seclusion. Such a punishment awoke all the feelings of conscientiousness and self-conviction that had so influenced her when she was a little girl, and Theresa, left to her own thoughts, first grew morbid, and then fell sick. During her sickness she resolved to become a nun, persuaded her ever-faithful brother, Pedro, to become a friar, and when Don Alphonso, their father, refused his consent, the brother and sister, repeating the folly of their childhood, again ran away from home. Then their father, seeing the uselessness of resistance, consented, and Theresa, at the age of twenty, entered a convent in Avila, and became a nun in what was known as the Order of the Carmelites.