"Why take such a circuit?" said Carlos, showing a disposition to turn in an opposite direction. "This is far the shorter way."
"True; but it is less pleasant."
Carlos looked at him gratefully. "My brother would spare my weakness," he said. "But it needs not. Twice of late, when you were engaged with Doña Beatriz, I went alone thither, and--to the Prado San Sebastian."
So they passed through the Puerta de Triana, and having crossed the bridge of boats, leisurely took their way beneath the walls of the grim old castle. As they did so, both prayed in silence for one who was pining in its dungeons. Don Juan, whose interest in the fate of Juliano was naturally far less intense than his brother's, was the first to break that silence. He remarked that the Dominican convent adjoining the Triana looked nearly as gloomy as the inquisitorial prison itself.
"I think it looks like all other convents," returned Carlos, with indifference.
They were soon in the shadow of the dark, ghost-like olive-trees. The moon was young, and gave but little light; but the large clear stars looked down through the southern air like lamps of fire, hanging not so much in the sky as from it. Were those bright watchers charged with a message from the land very far off, which seemed so near to them in the high places whence they ruled the night? Carlos drank in the spirit of the scene in silence. But this did not please his less meditative brother. "What art thou pondering?" he asked.
"'They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.'"
"Art thinking still of the prisoner in the Triana?"
"Of him, and also of another very dear to both of us, of whom I have for some time been purposing to speak to thee. What if thou and I have been, like children, seeking for a star on earth while all the time it was shining above us in God's glorious heaven?"
"Knowest thou not of old, little brother, that when thy parables begin I am left behind at once? I pray thee, let the stars alone, and speak the language of earth."