“Do you remember how your poor father used to laugh at me?  ‘This boy,’ he would say in the sacristy, ‘is a Sixtus V. What do you wish to be?’ he would ask me, and I always gave the same answer, ’Archbishop of Toledo.’  And the good sacristan would laugh again at the certainty with which I spoke of my hopes.  Believe me, Tomasa, I thought much of him when I was consecrated bishop, regretting his death.  I should have been delighted with his tears of joy seeing me with the mitre on my head.  I have always loved you, you are an excellent family, and have often satisfied my hunger.”

“Silence, senor, silence, and do not recall those things.  I am the one who ought to be grateful for your kindness, so simple and genuine in spite of your rank, which comes next after the Pope.  And the truth is,” added the old woman with the pride of her frankness, “that no one is the loser.  Friends like I am you can never have; like all the great ones of the earth, you are surrounded by flatterers and rascals.  If you had remained a simple mass priest no one would have sought you out, but Tomasa would have always been your friend, always ready to do you a service.  If I love you so much it is because you are kind and affable, but if you had put on pride like other archbishops, I should have kissed your ring and—­’Good-bye.’  The cardinal to his palace, the gardener’s widow to her garden.”

The prelate received the old woman’s frankness smilingly.

“You will always be Don Sebastian to me,” she continued.  “When you told me not to call you Eminence or to use the same ceremonies as other people, I was as pleased as if I had been given the mantle of the Virgin del Sagrario.  Such ceremonies would have stuck in my throat and made me ready to cry out, ’Let him have his fill of Eminence and Illustrious, but we have scratched each other thousands of times when we were little, and this big thief could never see a scrap of bread or an apricot in my hand without trying to snatch and devour it!’ You may be thankful I spoke of you as ’usted’[1] when you became a beneficiary of the Cathedral, for, after all, it would not do to ‘thou’ a priest as if he were an acolyte.”

[Footnote 1:  Contraction of vuestra merced—­your worship.]

Silence fell on the two old people, their eyes wandered tenderly over the garden, as if each tree or arcade covered with foliage contained some memory.

“Do you know what I have just remembered,” said Tomasa.  “I remember that we saw each other just here many many years ago, at least forty-eight or fifty.  I was with my poor elder sister who had just married Luna the gardener, and in the cloister wandering round me was he who afterwards became my husband.  We saw a handsome sergeant come into the summer-house with a great jingle of spurs, a sword on his arm, and a helmet with a tail just like the Jews on the Monument.  It was you, Don Sebastian, who had come to Toledo to visit your uncle the beneficiary,