"I will bring you more," he said, "if you will tell me how to get them to you."
She assured him that there was nothing simpler; and made him a participant in a dead secret only known to a few, of the hole in the convent wall, large enough to pass the hand through, down by the frog-pond at the bottom of the garden and near the old door which was never opened.
"If you wait there on Thursday evening between seven and eight I will come, if I can, and will poke my hand through the hole in the wall. But how shall I know that it is you?"
"I will kiss your hand when it comes through," answered Marcos.
"Yes," she said, rather slowly. "What a joke."
But now they were at the gate of the convent school, having come a short way, and they stood beneath the thick trees until the school came, with its usual accompaniment of eager talk like the running of water beneath a low bridge and its babble round the stones.
Juanita slipped in among her schoolmates, and Sor Teresa, looking straight in front of her, saw nothing.
[
CHAPTER X]
THISBE
It was the custom in the convent school on the Torrero-hill to receive visitors on Thursdays. This festivity farther extended to the evening, when the girls were allowed to walk for an hour in the garden and talk. Talking, it must be remembered, as an indulgence of the flesh, is considered in religious communities to be a treat only permitted at certain periods. It is, indeed, only by tying the tongue that tyranny can hope to live.