"The star, as you call it, has not failed in all these years," she answered, with a look of timid appeal which hardened to one of defiance.
"Nay," answered he coldly and lightly, "I never doubted it would—while there was oil to feed it."
On the morrow, then, I took up my station by the porch of the Cathedral, with a highly artistic wound in my left leg, a shade over my right eye, and beside me a crutch and a ragged cap. The first day brought me coppers only: but late on the second afternoon a stout citizen, pausing on the steps and catching his breath asthmatically before entering the Cathedral, dropped a paper pellet in with his penny. On the third day it began to rain pellets, and I drank that night to the assured success of our campaign.
I saw nothing of Fuentes. It had been agreed between us that I should play my part in my own fashion, and I played it so thoroughly as to take lodgings in the beggars' quarter, in a thieves' den—it was little better—off the Street of the Rosary. It was enough for me that, however Fuentes went about the sowing, the harvest kept pouring in. As for the Street of the Virgins, I had been brought to it and had quitted it in the dark, and it is a question if by daylight I could have found it again. At any rate, I did not try.
But on the fourth day, at about five in the afternoon, as the day's heat began to grow tolerable, I caught sight of Luisa herself picking her way towards the Cathedral porch along the pavement under the façade of the University. Before entering the great doors she paused on the step beside me, bent to drop a coin into my cap, and whispered—
"When I come out, follow me."
She passed on into the Cathedral and did not reappear for a quarter of an hour, perhaps. In this time I had made up my mind that, whatever the risk of my obeying her, she had probably weighed it against some risk more urgent, and perhaps brought the message direct from Fuentes. So when she came forth, and after pausing a moment to readjust her mantilla, tripped down the steps and away to the left down the street leading to the Porta del Rio, I picked up my crutch, yawned, shook the coppers in my wallet, and hobbled after her at a decent distance.
All the way I kept my eyes open and my ears too. In the streets around the Porta del Rio the city's traffic was beginning to flow again after the day's siesta: but I made pretty sure that we were not being tracked. Through half-a-dozen streets she led me, and so to one which I supposed to be the Street of the Virgins, and to a door which I recognised for that to which Fuentes had brought me four nights ago.
She had already knocked and been admitted: but the door opened again as I came abreast of it, and I stepped past the porter into the passage. Luisa stood half-way up the first flight of stairs under a sunny window and beckoned, and aloft I climbed after her to her attic. With her hand on the latch of her own door, she turned.