Don Manuel de Lara: Well? And is it well? My God! Well, a trovar from France who had entered your convent disguised as a friar obtained from Trotaconventos this key, which I likewise desired, first because it opens this postern, secondly because ... toys are apt to take for me a vast significance and swell out with all the potencies of my happiness in this world, my salvation in the next, and thus it happened with this key; the fire rushed on, I killed the trovar and took the key!
Sister Pilar (horror-stricken): You killed him?
Don Manuel de Lara: Yes ... and would have killed a thousand such for the key ... a low, French jongleur! The world is all the better for his loss. The dog! Daring to think he could seduce the nuns of Spain!
Sister Pilar: Well?
Don Manuel de Lara: The rest is told in few words. My madness over (for that night I was mad) the key in my hands, counsel returned to me, and showed me that it was not only through the key I could win to your convent ... it is dreams that open only to this key; strange dreams I only know in fragments ... and I minded me of an exemplum told by the king Don Sancho, in his book, of a knight that craved to talk with a nun, and to affect the same, feigned to be her kinsman. The night I was the other side this wall and you were taunting Sister Assumcion, you named yourself a Guzman whose mother was a Perez. I had but to go to a herald and learn from him all the particulars pertaining to the family of Perez y Guzman.
Sister Pilar: You wished to have speech with me?
Don Manuel de Lara: Yes.
Sister Pilar: Why?
Don Manuel de Lara: I have already said that no one knows the bourne of fire.
Sister Pilar (scornfully): The bourne of fire! The bourne rather of ... I’ll not soil my lips with the word. Let me reduce your “fires,” and “lyres,” and “moons” to plain, cold words; having wearied of Sister Assumcion, you thought you’d sample another nun—one maybe taking a greater stretch of arm to reach; like children with figs—a bite out of one, then flung away, then scrambling for another on a higher branch, that in its turn it, too, may be bitten and thrown. Or, maybe, Sister Assumcion found the trovar more to her taste than you ... yes, I have it! I am to bring a little balm to Sister Assumcion’s discarded lover!