The Spaniard thought of Mary. At this time she must be in the perfumed shadows of her room, her blonde head clasped in her arms, sleeping her first real sleep of the night, her tired body still vibrant from fatigue. Poor John Huss! Febrer sympathized with him as if he had been his friend. To burn him in the presence of such a beautiful landscape, perhaps on a morning like this! To cast one's self into the wolf's mouth, and to give up one's life over the question whether the Pope were good or bad, or whether laymen should receive the sacrament with wine the same as priests! To die for such absurdities when life is so beautiful and the heretic might have enjoyed it so richly with any of the plump-breasted, big-hipped blonde women, friends of the cardinals, who witnessed his torture! Unhappy apostle! Jaime ironically pitied the simplicity of the martyr. He looked at life through different eyes. _Viva el amor!_ Love was the only thing worth while in life.
They remained nearly a month in the ancient episcopal city, strolling out in the gloaming through the lonely, grass-grown streets with their crumbling palaces of the time of the Council; floating with the current down the river Rhine along its forest-clad banks; stopping to look at the tiny houses with red roofs and spacious arbors beneath which sang the bourgeoisie, stein in hand, with the Germanic joy of a subchanter, grave and reposeful.
From Constance they passed on to Switzerland and afterward to Italy. They traveled together for a year viewing landscapes, seeing museums, visiting ruins, the windings and sheltered nooks in which Jaime made use of for kissing Mary's pearly skin, reveling in the rush of color and the gesture of annoyance with which she protested "Shocking!"
The old traveling companion, unconscious as a suitcase of the points of interest in their journey, continued making the cloak of Irish point, beginning in Germany, and working at it while crossing the Alps, along the whole length of the Apennines, and in sight of Vesuvius and Ætna. Unable to talk with Febrer, who spoke no English, she greeted him with the yellowish glitter of her teeth and returned to her task, forming a conspicuous figure in the hotel lobbies.