[Footnote 3:  Perrero—­Beadle whose special duty it is to chase the dogs out of church.]

Sounds of footsteps were heard on the narrow circular staircase in the thickness of the wall that led from the sitting-room to the storey above.

“It is Don Luis,” said the “Wooden Staff,” “he is going to say his mass in the chapel of the Sagrario, and afterwards to the choir.”

Gabriel rose from his sofa to salute the priest.  He was feeble and small of stature, but the thing about him that struck you at first sight was the disproportion between his shrunken body and his immense head.  The forehead, round and prominent, seemed to crush with its weight the dark and irregular features, much pitted by smallpox.  He was very ugly, but still the expression of his blue eyes, the brilliancy of his white and regular teeth, and the ingenuous smile, almost childlike, that played on his lips, gave his face that sympathetic expression which showed him to be one of those simple souls wrapped up in their artistic fancies.

“And so this gentleman is the brother of whom you have spoken to me so often,” said he, hearing the introduction made by Esteban.

He held out his hand in a friendly way to Gabriel.  They both looked very sickly, but their bodily infirmities seemed to be a bond of attraction.

“As the senor has studied in the seminary,” said the Chapel-master, “he will know something about music.”

“It is the only thing that I remember of all those studies.”

“But having travelled so much all over the world, you must have heard a great deal of good music.”

“That is so.  Music is to me the most pleasing of all the arts.  I do not know much about it, but I feel it.”

“Very well, very well, we shall be good friends.  You must tell me all sorts of things; how I envy you having travelled so much.”

He spoke like a restless child, without sitting down.  Although the “Silenciario” offered him a chair at each of his flirtings round the room, he wandered from side to side in his shabby cloak, his hat in his hand—­a poor worn-out hat with not a trace of pile left, knocked in, with a layer of grease on its flaps, miserable and old, like the cassock and the shoes.  But in spite of this poverty the Chapel-master had a certain refinement about him.  His hair, rather too long for his ecclesiastical dress, curled round his temples, and the dignified way in which he folded his cloak round his body reminded one of the cloak of a tenor at the opera.  He had a sort of easy grace that betrayed the artist who, under the priestly robes, was longing to get rid of them, leaving them at his feet like a winding sheet.

Some deep notes from the bell, like distant thunder, floated into the room through the cloister.

“Uncle, they are calling us to the choir,” said the “Tato.”  “We ought to have been in the Cathedral before now; it is nearly eight o’clock.”