d wider open{4} than those of an owl, and by two powerful lackeys, who guarded her on either side like towers. So jealous was Don Alonso, that he only permitted this fugitive visit because his confessor had strictly enjoined it on him, and for fear of offending Our Lady his neighbour, and he greedily noted their every step and their loitering from between the iron bars of a latticed window.
Donna Leonor spent the whole of the lingering days of the lingering week secluded in the grated mansion of black granite; and all she had for recreation and air, even in the summer heats, were the depths of a dark green garden surrounded by such lofty walls that nothing could be seen emerging from them save here and there the top of some melancholy cypress. But this short visit of hers to Our Lady of the Pillar sufficed for Don Ruy to fall{5} madly in love with her on the May morning when he saw her kneeling before the altar in a radiance of sunlight, haloed by her golden hair, with her long lashes hanging over a Book of Hours, her rosary falling from between her delicate fingers, all elegant, gentle and white, with the whiteness of a lily blooming in the shade, looking yet whiter amid her black lace and the black satin gown that broke round her graceful form in hard folds over the chapel flags, the ancient flags of burying-places. When, after a moment of confusion and delicious wonder, he knelt, it was less to the Virgin of the Pillar, his divine Godmother, than to that mortal apparition; her name and life he knew not, but only that he would give his life and name for her if she would yield herself for so uncertain a price.{6}
Murmuring in a graceless prayer the three Ave Maria’s with which he saluted Mary each morning, he picked up
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(lido em Pequim, China)