Then followed Washerwoman, and Chicken-Market, Rose and Pink, and Golden Earrings, and when, at noon, Don Carlos and Rafael came back, the children were all absorbed in the circle-dance of _Mambrú_. Don Carlos remembered the song from his own childhood in Saragossa and hummed the pathetic couplets under his breath, as he stood watching. “Mambrú is gone to serve the king, And comes no more by fall or spring. “We’ve looked until our eyes are dim. Will no one give us word of him? “You’d know him for his mother’s son By peasant dress of Aragon. “You’d know him for my husband dear By broidered kerchief on his spear. “The one I broider now is wet. Oh, may I see him wear it yet!” With the last word of the song all the little figures in the circle flung themselves face downward on the ground, so impetuously that Carmencita and Pepito bumped their heads together and set up such a duet of stormy weeping that, for dramatic close, there was nothing left to be desired. Don Carlos swung Pilarica, hotter and more weary than Rafael himself, to her feet, and as she smiled up into his face, she saw in it, for all its gravity, a great relief. Tia Marta, too, who met them at the garden gate, was quick to read his look. “Your heart has been taking a bath of roses,” she said. And Don Carlos, in the same breath, was telling her his good tidings. “Rodrigo drew a lucky number. There is weeping in other homes to-day, but not in ours.” “Other people’s troubles are easily borne,” scoffed Tia Marta, but the dry, walnut face was twitching so strangely that the children wished it had been polite to laugh. After their simple luncheon, a hunch of bread and a bowlful of olives for each, Pilarica coaxed Rafael out to the summer-house where the boy, not ill-pleased to have an audience for his story, seated himself with his back against the column and recounted the great event of the day. “The Gov’ment,” he explained, with the dignity of a prime minister, “needs more soldiers for Cuba.” “Acorns,” murmured Pilarica. “And so it has set up in every city and town and village--my father told me so--urns for the lottery, and all the men who ar’n’t too young, like me, or too old, like Grandfather and the Geography Gentleman, draw out a number. If it’s a very, very high number, you don’t go to Cuba, but if isn’t, you do.” “And Rodrigo?” breathed Pilarica, who was sitting on the ground exactly in front of Rafael, leaning forward and squeezing her sandals in her hands so hard that her toes ached all the rest of the afternoon. Rafael’s eyes glowed. “Oh, he was so tall and straight as he stood there waiting his turn. He had his cap in his hand and he waved it and looked right across the urn to my father and me and laughed. And my father took off his hat to him. Think of that! My father! Some day I am going to be a hero, like the Cid, and then, perhaps, he will take off his hat to me.”