and lifted her hands to the sun.




THE HEAD OF A PRIEST


I

"Doña Concepción had the greatest romance of us all; so she should not
chide too bitterly."

"But she has such a sense of her duty! Such a sense of her duty! Ay,
Dios de mi alma! Shall we ever grow like that?"

"If we have a Russian lover who is killed in the far North, and we have
a convent built for us, and teach troublesome girls. Surely, if one goes
through fire, one can become anything--"

"Ay, yi! Look! Look!"

Six dark heads were set in a row along the edge of a secluded corner of
the high adobe wall surrounding the Convent of Monterey. They looked
for all the world like a row of charming gargoyles--every mouth was
open--although there was no blankness in those active mischief-hunting
eyes. Their bodies, propped on boxes, were concealed by the wall from
the passer-by, and from the sharp eyes of dueñas by a group of trees
just behind them. Their section of the wall faced the Presidio, which in
the early days of the eighteenth century had not lost an adobe, and was