Gabriel examined the child, noting its extreme emaciation and the spots that scrofula had spread over its straw-coloured skin.  He shook his head incredulously when the neighbours who had gathered round the invalid each diagnosed some particular ailment, and recommended every imaginable sort of household remedy, from decoctions of rare herbs and stinking ointments to applications on the chest of miracle working prints, and tracing seven crosses on the navel with as many paternosters.

“It is hunger,” said Luna to his niece, “nothing but hunger.”  And depriving himself of part of his own food, he sent to the shoemaker’s house the milk that had been brought up for himself.  But the child’s stomach could not retain the liquid too substantial for its weakness, and threw it up as soon as swallowed.  The Aunt Tomasa, with her energetic and enterprising character, brought a woman from outside the Cathedral to nourish the child, but after two days, and before the effects became visible, she came no more, as if she had felt disgusted at the miserable and corpse-like little body touching her.  In vain the gardener’s widow searched; it was not easy to find generous breasts who would give their milk for very little pay.

In the meanwhile the child was dying.  All the women came in and out of the shoemaker’s house, and even Don Antolin would stand at the door in the mornings.

“How is the little one?  Just the same?  It is all in God’s hands.”

And he would retire, doing the shoemaker the great charity of not speaking to him about the pesetas he owed him, on account of the sick child.

“Virgin’s Blue” was annoyed by this incident, which upset the calm of the cloister, and disturbed the bliss of his digestion as a happy and well-fed servant of the Church.  It was a shame that that shoemaker should be allowed to live in the Claverias with all that flock of wretched and scurvy children; one would die every month; all sorts of illness would lay hold on them.  By what right were they in the Cathedral when they drew no wage from the Obreria?  Such stinking excrescences ought to remain outside the Lord’s house.

His mother-in-law was furious.

“Silence, you thief of the saints!” she cried.  “Silence, or I will throw a dish at you!  We are all sons of God, and if things were as they should be, all the poor ought to live in the Cathedral.  Instead of saying such things it would be much better if you gave those unhappy people part of what you have stolen from the Virgin.”

The sacristan shrugged his shoulders with contempt.  If they had not enough to eat they should not have children.  There he was himself with only one daughter—­he did not think he had any right to more—­and so thanks to Our Lady he was able to save a scrap for his old age.

Tomasa spoke of the shoemaker’s child to the good gentlemen of the Chapter when they came into the garden for a few minutes after choir.  They listened absently, putting their hands in their cassocks.