[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, and who would not leave without visiting your friend Tomasita. How handsome and smart you were. I do not say it to flatter you, it is truth. You looked like being a rogue with the girls! And I still remember you said something to me about how pretty and fresh you thought me after so many years absence. You don't mind my reminding you of this? Really? It was only a soldier's gallant jests. How many would say that now? When you left, I said to my brother-in-law, 'He has put on the uniform for good and all; it is useless his uncle, the beneficiary, thinking of making a priest of him.'"
"It was a youthful sally," said the cardinal smiling, remembering with pride the dashing sergeant of dragoons. "In Spain, there are only three professions worthy of a man--the sword, the Church and the toga. My blood was hot and I wanted to be a soldier, but unluckily I fell on times of peace, my promotion would have been very slow, and in order not to embitter my uncle's last years, I renewed my studies and turned to the Church. One can serve God or one's country as well in one place as another, but, believe me, very often in spite of the pomp of my cardinalate I think with envy of that soldier you saw. What happy times they were! Even now the sword draws me. When I see the cadets I would gladly exchange with some of them, giving them my crozier and cross. And possibly I might have done better than any of them! Ah! if only the great times of the reconquest could return when the prelates went out to fight the Moors! What a great Archbishop of Toledo I should have been!"