He had made his confession at Easter and been absolved--the past was balanced, the future incomprehensible,--but tonight he could dance with a free heart. He followed the clue of the music along mazy alleyways, his body a little giddy at times from weeks of undernourishment, but his mind at peace. At last he came out where the wider street was crowded with the grave dancers and the throb of the guitars echoed like silver blood in the dark veins of heaven. He stood for a moment, observing the scene. The street was lit by torches--occasionally one of them would sputter and send up a shower of tiny golden bees in the still air. Beneath them the dissolving patterns of the dance formed and broke and reformed again like a shower of the colored petals of flowers stirred by light wind. The women danced discreetly, their eyes cast on the ground; the men were more extravagant in their gestures; but in the faces of both, the eyes were large with starvation and solemn with joy. The rebozillas pinned about the heads of the women did not hide the faint hollows in their cheeks--hunger had given them a new and extenuate beauty--their feet seemed lighter to them and a little mad. The red worsted girdles of the men were drawn tighter about their bodies, their cheeks showed the play of hunger too, but their broad flat shoes of white leather slapped gallantly on the stones; and in a corner of shadows the musicians plucked at their ribboned instruments yet more swiftly and the dance went on and on, without beginning or end. Occasionally, without apparent reason, the musicians would give in unison a short sonorous cry, and the bystanders would call out at once "Long live the dancers!" in reticent approval, to be echoed by a low, soft murmur from the dancers of "Long live the lookers-on!" Such was the courtesy of Minorca, and to Sebastian, as he watched, the murmurous call and response turned to the perpetual cooing of the ringdoves in the sea-caves where his father had been drowned and the red of worsted girdle and Phrygian cap was the blood of the sun sinking into the waters of evening above the Altar of the Gentiles, and music touched at the heart, and an island was hard to leave. But presently he found himself dancing, too--aloofly and arrogantly as befits a man of fifteen.