to visit Gallows Hill, because the Feast of the Holy Apostles was drawing nigh, he had discovered, to his great amazement and scandal, that one of the hanged men had a dagger nailed in his breast! Was it some wicked rogue’s jest? A vengeance that not even death had sated?... And to make the prodigy greater still, the body had been taken down from the gibbet, dragged in some vegetable or flower-garden, since tender leaves had been found clinging to the old rags, and afterwards had been hanged again, and with a new rope!... And such, then, was the turbulence of the times that not even the dead escaped outrage! Don Alonso listened, with hands trembling and hair on end. And immediately, in an anguish of agitation, shouting and stumbling against the doors, he wanted to set off and verify the dismal profanation with his own eyes. On two mules, hurriedly caparisoned, they both started away for Gallows Hill, he and the astounded chaplain, whom he dragged after him. A large concourse of the people of Segovia had already collected on the hill, gazing on the marvellous horror--the dead man who had been slain!... They all stepped aside for the noble Lord of Lara, who hurled himself up the ridge and stood and gazed, staring and livid, at the hanged man, and at the dagger which pierced his breast. It was his dagger--it was he who had killed the dead! He galloped in terror to Cabril, and there shut himself up with his secret, and straightway began to grow yellow and pine away, always keeping at a distance from Donna Leonor, and hiding in the gloomy walks of the garden, murmuring words to the wind, until early one St. John’s Day, a maidservant, returning from the fountain with her pitcher, found him dead below the stone balcony, all stretched out on the ground, with his fingers fixed in the bed of wallflowers, where he seemed to have been raking the soil for a long space, searching.... IV