more adroitly than she fingered the vibrant strings. At last her wild,
romantic verses became more unrestrained; the music quickened until,
regardless of all things, Fray Joseph burst the thicket asunder and
stood before her, huge, exalted, palpitant.

"I, too, have sung those songs," he panted, hoarsely. "That melody has
lived in me since time began; but I am mute. And you? Who are you?
What miracle bestowed this gift--?"

He paused, for with the ending of the song his frenzy was dying and
his eyes were clearing. There, casting back his curious gaze, was a
bewitching Moorish maid whose physical perfection seemed to cause the
very place to glow. The slanting sunbeams shimmered upon her silken
garments; from her careless hand drooped an instrument of gold and of
tortoise-shell, an instrument strange to the eyes of the monk. Her
feet were cased in tiny slippers of soft Moroccan leather; her limbs,
rounded and supple and smooth as ivory, were outlined beneath wide
flowing trousers which were gathered at the ankles. A tunic of finest
fabric was flung back, displaying a figure of delicate proportions,
half recumbent now upon the sward.

The loveliness of Moorish women has been heralded to the world; it is
not strange that this maid, renowned even among her own people, should
have struck the rustic priest to dumbness. He stood transfixed; and
yet he wondered not, for it was seemly that such heavenly music should
have sprung from the rarest of mortals. He saw that her hair, blacker
than the night, rippled in a glorious cascade below her waist, and
that her teeth embellished with the whiteness of alabaster the
vermilion lips which smiled at him.