"That is the very thing, sinner that I am," returned the Student. "To a certainty I must have left it in bad hands, since it has been stolen from me." "I say the same," rejoined Cortado, "but there is a remedy for every misfortune excepting death. The best thing your worship can do now is to have patience, for after all it is God who has made us, and after one day there comes another. If one hour gives us wealth, another takes it away; but it may happen that the man who has stolen your purse may in time repent, and may return it to your worship, with all the interest due on the loan." "The interest I will forgive him," exclaimed the Student; and Cortado resumed:--"There are, besides, those letters of excommunication, the Paulinas;[15] and there is also good diligence in seeking for the thief, which is the mother of success. Of a truth, Sir, I would not willingly be in the place of him who has stolen your purse; for if your worship have received any of the sacred orders, I should feel as if I had been guilty of some great crime--nay of sacrilege--in stealing from your person." [15] _Paulinas_ are the letters of excommunication despatched by the ecclesiastical courts for the discovery of such things as are supposed to be stolen or maliciously concealed. "Most certainly the thief has committed a sacrilege," replied the Student, in pitiable tones; "for although I am not in orders, but am only a Sacristan of certain nuns, yet the money in my purse was the third of the income due from a chapelry, which I had been commissioned to receive by a priest, who is one of my friends, so that the purse does, in fact, contain blessed and sacred money." "Let him eat his sin with his bread," exclaimed Rincon at that moment; "I should be sorry to become bail for the profit he will obtain from it. There will be a day of judgment at the last, when all things will have to pass, as they say, through the holes of the colander, and it will then be known who was the scoundrel that has had the audacity to plunder and make off with the whole third of the revenue of a chapelry! But tell me, Mr. Sacristan, on your life, what is the amount of the whole yearly income?" "Income to the devil, and you with it,[16]" replied the Sacristan, with more rage than was becoming; "am I in a humour to talk to you about income? Tell me, brother, if you know anything of the purse; if not, God be with you--I must go and have it cried." [16] (This footnote is missing from the printed edition.) "That does not seem to me so bad a remedy," remarked Cortado; "but I warn your worship not to forget the precise description of the purse, nor the exact sum that it contains; for if you commit the error of a single mite, the money will never be suffered to appear again while the world is a world, and that you may take for a prophecy."