and he bent and re-bent on the floor the sword-blade he was to wear at his girdle to test it.... But his chief care was the road to Cabril, though he knew it well, and the village clustering round the Franciscan Monastery, and the old Roman bridge with its Calvary, and the deep lane that led to the heritage of the Lord of Lara. In that very winter he had passed by there as he was going out to hunt on the mountains with two friends from Astorga, and had caught sight of the tower of the Laras, and thought: 'There is the tower of my ungrateful one.’ How he had deceived himself! The nights were now moonlight, and he would leave Segovia quietly by the gate of St. Mauros. A short gallop and he would be at Gallows Hill. He knew it well also, that place of sadness and terror, with its four stone pillars where criminals were hanged, and where their bodies remained, swayed to and fro by the winds and parched by the sun, until the cords grew rotten and the skeletons fell down, white, and cleaned of their flesh by the ravens’ beaks. Behind the hill lay the Ladies’ Lagoon. The last time he had been by there was on the day of the Apostle St. Matthias, when the Corregedor and the Confraternities of Charity and Peace went in procession to give holy burial to the skeletons which had fallen on the black earth, picked of their flesh by the birds. From there the road ran smooth and straight to Cabril. Thus did Don Ruy meditate his venturesome journey whilst the afternoon was waning. But when it grew dark, and the bats began to circle about the church towers, and the niches of the Holy Souls were lighted up in the corners of the square, the brave youth felt a strange fear, the fear of that happiness which was drawing near to him, and which seemed to him supernatural. Was it true then that this woman, famous throughout Castile for her divine beauty, and more inaccessible than a constellation, would in a short space be his--all his, in the silence and security of an alcove, when these devotional lights before the pictures of the Holy Souls had not yet been extinguished? And what had he done to enjoy so great a good? He had trod the flags of a square, he had waited in the porch of a church, and sought with his eyes two other eyes which, either through indifference or want of attention, remained lowered. Then, without grief, he had abandoned his hope.... And lo! suddenly those absent eyes seek him, and those closed arms open to him, wide and bare, and with her body and soul that woman cries out to him: 'O foolish man, that you did not understand me! Come! She who discouraged you now belongs to you!’ Was there ever such fortune as this? So great, so rare was it, that, unless human experience errs, ill-fortune must already be in pursuit! It was so of a truth already, since how great an ill-fortune lay in the knowledge that after such good fortune, when, early in the morning, he left her divine embrace and