Twice he stopped.  The magnetism of the only woman that had ever awakened his love drew him back.  He thought of her despair, her utter and, this time, unsupportable loneliness; the careless girl with the risen sun would be a broken-hearted woman.

But he ran on.

Spain beckoned.  The highest dignities of the Church were his.  He saw his political influence a byword in Europe.  He felt Dorthe’s arms about him, her soft breath on his cheek, and uttered a short savage scream; but he went on.

When he reached the harbour three men had already landed.  They recognized him, and fell at his feet.  And when he told them that he was alone on the island, they reembarked without question.  And he lived, and forgot, and realized his great ambitions.

Thirty years later a sloop put into the harbour of the island for repairs.  Several of the men went on shore.  They discovered footprints in the sand.  Wondering, for they had sailed the length of the island and seen no sign of habitation, they followed the steps.  They came upon a curious creature which was scraping with a bone knife the blubber from a seal.  At first they thought it was a bird of some unknown species, so sharp was its beak, so brilliant its plumage.  But when they spoke to it and it sprang aside and confronted them, they saw that the creature was an aged woman.  Her face was like an old black apple, within whose skin the pulp had shrunk and withered as it lay forgotten on the ground.  Her tawny hair hung along her back like a ragged mat.  There was no light in the dim vacuous eyes.  She wore a garment made of the unplucked skins of birds.  They spoke to her.  She uttered a gibberish unknown to them with a voice that croaked like a frog’s, then went down on her creaking knees and lifted her hands to the sun.

THE HEAD OF A PRIEST

I

“Dona Concepcion 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 duenas 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,