Is it not possible that he may have survived?"
The lean, swarthy face of Frey Miguel grew pensive. He did not
impatiently scorn the suggestion as she had half-feared he would.
"In Portugal," he answered slowly, "it is firmly believed that he
lives, and that one day he will come, like another Redeemer, to
deliver his country from the thrall of Spain."
"Then . . . then . . ."
Wistfully, he smiled. "A people will always believe what it
wishes to believe."
"But you, yourself?" she pressed him.
He did not answer her at once. The cloud of thought deepened on
his ascetic face. He half turned from her--they were standing in
the shadow of the fretted cloisters--and his pensive eyes roamed
over the wide quadrangle that was at once the convent garden and
burial ground. Out there in the sunshine amid the hum of
invisible but ubiquitously pulsating life, three nuns, young and
vigorous, their arms bared to the elbows, the skirts of their
black habits shortened by a cincture of rope, revealing feet
roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and mattock,
digging their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of the
cloisters, within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de
Grado and Dona Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by
King Philip to an office as nearly akin to that of ladies-in-
waiting as claustral conditions would permit.
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