Don Manuel de Lara: The Cid? His bones still moulder in Cardeña.
Sister Pilar: No, no, my father’s greyhound ... the one that has one eye blue and the other brown.
Don Manuel de Lara: Ah! He still sleeps by day and bays at the moon o’ nights.
Sister Pilar: Oh! And how tall has my oak grown now?
Don Manuel de Lara: Your oak?
Sister Pilar: Ah, surely they cannot have forgot to show it you! It was the height of a daffodil when I took the veil. When we were children, you know, we were told an exemplum of a wise Moor who planted trees that under their shade his children’s children might call him blessed, so we—Sancho and Rodrigo and little Violante and me—we took acorns from the pigs’ trough and planted them beyond the orchard, near my mother’s bed of gillyflowers, and mine was the only one that sent forth shoots. Oh! And the bush of Granada roses ... they must have shown you them?
Don Manuel de Lara: To be sure! They are still fragrant.
Sister Pilar: You know, they were planted from seeds my grandsire got in the Alhambra when he was jousting in Granada. My father was wont to call them his harem of Moorish beauties, and there was a nightingale that would serenade them every evening from the Judas tree that shadows them. It was always to them he sang, he cared not a jot for the other roses in the garden.
Don Manuel de Lara: The rose-tree died of blight and the nightingale of a broken heart the year you took the veil.
Sister Pilar: You are jesting!