man in that city so deft at clearing the skin of blemishes or changing the colour of the hair as old Fonseca’s nephew, and as any one may know this reputation alone was worth a fortune.  Thus it came about that I was more and more consulted on my own account.  In short, things went so well with us that in the first six months of my service I added by one third to the receipts of my master’s practice, large as they had been before, besides lightening his labours not a little.

It was a strange life, and of the things that I saw and learned, could they be written, I might make a tale indeed, but they have no part in this history.  For it was as though the smiles and silence with which men and women hide their thoughts were done away, and their hearts spoke to us in the accents of truth.  Now some fair young maid or wife would come to us with confessions of wickedness that would be thought impossible, did not her story prove itself; the secret murder perchance of a spouse, or a lover, or a rival; now some aged dame who would win a husband in his teens, now some wealthy low-born man or woman, who desired to buy an alliance with one lacking money, but of noble blood.  Such I did not care to help indeed, but to the love-sick or the love-deluded I listened with a ready ear, for I had a fellow-feeling with them.  Indeed so deep and earnest was my sympathy that more than once I found the unhappy fair ready to transfer their affections to my unworthy self, and in fact once things came about so that, had I willed it, I could have married one of the loveliest and wealthiest noble ladies of Seville.

But I would none of it, who thought of my English Lily by day and night.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SECOND MEETING

It may be thought that while I was employed thus I had forgotten the object of my coming to Spain, namely to avenge my mother’s murder on the person of Juan de Garcia.  But this was not so.  So soon as I was settled in the house of Andres de Fonseca I set myself to make inquiries as to de Garcia’s whereabouts with all possible diligence, but without result.

Indeed, when I came to consider the matter coolly it seemed that I had but a slender chance of finding him in this city.  He had, indeed, given it out in Yarmouth that he was bound for Seville, but no ship bearing the same name as his had put in at Cadiz or sailed up the Guadalquivir, nor was it likely, having committed murder in England, that he would speak the truth as to his destination.  Still I searched on.  The house where my mother and grandmother had lived was burned down, and as their mode of life had been retired, after more than twenty years of change few even remembered their existence.  Indeed I only discovered one, an old woman whom I found living in extreme poverty, and who once had been my grandmother’s servant and knew my mother well, although she was not in the house at the time of her flight to England.  From this woman I gathered some information, though, needless to say, I did not tell her that I was the grandson of her old mistress.