"Then when he comes back he'll be thrice as old as you are. He'll have no hair, no teeth, and he'll be as blind as a bat. So how much good will he be?"
"How much good will the King be?" bellowed the Sebastianista. "How much good? Senhor Emilio Domingos Carneiro, I'll tell you. If he's an old man, thank God for that! Portugal has suffered enough from the young ones. And hark to this: He'll be a true old Portuguese. He'll be a man, not a dandy. He won't crack whips and wear spurs unless he can mount a horse without falling off on the other side."
At this home-thrust most of the young men chuckled or laughed outright, while the girls giggled. Donna Perpetua, however, was flurried and Emilio's cousins tried to protest. With ready tact Senhor Jorge preserved the peace.
"Come, Joaquim," he said. "Talking has made you thirsty. Come with me and I'll find you a mug of good wine to drink King Sebastião's health in."
The old man, proud at having had the best of it, departed nimbly in his host's wake and was no more heard or seen.
"Does the Senhor believe that Dom Sebastião will ever return?" asked the handsome yoke-carver, turning to Antonio.
"I've just been reckoning," the monk answered, "that it is more than two hundred and sixty years since the day of the battle."
Two hundred and sixty meant little to the handsome youth, who had never had occasion to engage his brains with any such number. He knew that he possessed ten fingers and ten toes, and that there were seven days in the week and that his father owned eight bullocks; but who had ever heard of such a number as two hundred and sixty? He stared at Antonio blankly.
"It seems to me," put in José, "that when we see Dom Sebastião on a white horse, it will be his ghost."
He uttered the word "ghost" in a tone which made the pretty Rosalina Saldanha clasp her pretty hands and emit a pretty squeak. The other damsels squeaked after her, in chorus. They reveled in ghost-tales, although they dreaded them.