The recluse, in hopes of a perquisite, led the two women toward the door of the hermitage, where his wife and daughter had appeared, to feast their eyes on the huge diamonds sparkling at the ears of the strange lady.

“Enter, sinorita” the rustic invited.  “I’ll show you the Virgin, the Virgin del Lluch, you understand, the only genuine one.  She came here alone all the way from Majorca.  People down in Palma claim they have the real Virgin.  But what can they say for themselves?  They are jealous because our Lady chose Alcira; and here we have her, proving that she’s the real one by the miracles she works.”

He opened the door of the tiny church, which was as cool and gloomy as a cellar.  At the rear, on a baroque altar of tarnished gold, stood the little statue with its hollow cloak and its black face.

Rapidly, by rote almost, the good man recited the history of the image.  The Virgin del Lluch was the patroness of Majorca.  A hermit had been compelled to flee from there, for a reason no one had been able to discover—­perhaps to get away from some Saracen girl of those exciting, war-like days!  And to rescue the Virgin from profanation he brought her to Alcira, and built this sanctuary for her.  Later people from Majorca came to return her to their island.  But the celestial lady had taken a liking to Alcira and its inhabitants.  Over the water, and without even wetting her feet, she came gliding back.  Then the Majorcans, to keep what had happened quiet, counterfeited a new statue that looked just like the first.  All this was gospel truth, and as proof, there lay the original hermit buried at the foot of the altar; and there was the Virgin, too, her face blackened by the sun and the salt wind on her miraculous voyage over the sea.

The beautiful lady smiled slightly, as she listened.  The maid was all ears, not to lose a word of a language she but half understood, her credulous peasant eyes traveling from the Virgin to the hermit and from the hermit to the Virgin, plainly expressing the wonder she was feeling at such a portentous miracle.  Rafael had followed the party into the shrine and taken a position near the fascinating stranger.  She, however, pretended not to see him.

“That is only a legend,” he ventured to remark, when the rustic had finished his story.  “You understand, of course, that nobody hereabouts accepts such tales as true.”

“I suppose so,” the lady answered coldly.

“Legend or no legend, don Rafael,” the recluse grumbled, somewhat peeved, “that’s what my grandfather and all the folk of his day used to say; and that’s what people still believe.  If the story has been handed down so long, there must be something to it.”

The patch of sunlight that shone through the doorway upon the flagstones was darkened by the shadow of a woman.  It was a poorly clad orchard worker, young, it seemed, but with a face pale, and as rough as wrinkled paper, all the crevices and hollows of her cranium showing, her eyes sunken and dull, her unkempt hair escaping from beneath her knotted kerchief.  She was barefoot, carrying her shoes in her hand.  She stood with her legs wide apart, as if in an effort to keep her balance.  She seemed to feel intense pain whenever she stepped upon the ground.  Illness and poverty were written on every feature of her person.