La Giralda was about to lay the wooden puppet aside as a thing of little worth, but something in the clutch of the small dead hands touched and troubled her. She altered her intention. "No, you shall not be parted!" she said, "and if there be a resurrection as the priests prate of--why, you shall e'en wake with the doll in your arms!" So the pair, in death not divided, were wrapt up together, and the gipsy woman prepared to carry her light burden afield. But before doing so she went to the bed. It was an ancient woman who lay thereon, clutching the bed-clothes, and drawn together with the last agony. La Giralda gazed at her a moment. "You I cannot carry--it is impossible," she muttered; "you must take your chance--even as I, if so be that the plague comes to me from this innocent!" Nevertheless, she cast another coverlet over the dead woman's face, and went down the broad stairs of red brick, carrying her burden like a precious thing. La Giralda might be no good Catholic, no fervent Protestant, but I doubt not the First Martyr of the faith, the Preacher of the Mount, would have admitted her to be a very fair Christian. On the whole I cannot think her chances in the life to come inferior to those of the astute Don Baltasar Varela, Prior of the Abbey of Montblanch, or those of many a shining light of orthodoxy in a world given to wickedness. Down in the shady angle of the little orchard the old gipsy found a little garden of flowers, geranium and white jasmine, perhaps planted to cast into the rude coffin of a neighbour, _Yerba Luisa_, or lemon verbena for the decoctions of a simple pharmacopoeia, on the outskirts of these a yet smaller plot had been set aside. It was edged with white stones from the hillside, and many coloured bits of broken crockery decorated it. A rose-bush in the midst had been broken down by some hasty human foot, or perhaps by a bullock or other large trespassing animal. There were nigh a score of rose-buds upon it--all now parched and dead, and the whole had taken on the colour of the soil. La Giralda stood a moment before laying her burden down. She had the strong heart of her ancient people. The weakness of tears had not visited her eyes for years--indeed, not since she was a girl, and had cried at parting from her first sweetheart, whom she never saw again. So she looked apparently unmoved at the pitiful little square of cracked earth, edged with its fragments of brown and blue pottery, and at the broken rose-bush lying as if also plague-stricken across it, dusty, desolate, and utterly forlorn. Yet, as we have said, was her heart by no means impervious to feeling. She had wonderful impulses, this parched mahogany-visaged Giralda. "It is the little one's own garden--I will lay her here!" she said to herself.