“Dearest, let me give you the cup of chocolate and the bit of bread, for I ate my breakfast long ago, before you woke.” She did not tell her mother how scant that meal had been.
“I hardly know if I wish for it,” her mother was beginning; but Augustina was already in the next room, which served them as a kitchen, and soon hurried back bearing a small tray on which was the cup of chocolate and the bit of crusty bread which is the breakfast of every true Spaniard. Food was scant enough in more households than this. Augustina’s mother, a widow with barely enough to scrape along on, was aided in peaceful days by the sale of the lace which Augustina’s skilful fingers made. Everybody in Spain loves lace, and every woman wore it, having her whole mantilla of it if she could afford it, and trimmed with it if she could do no better. Her holiday skirt was flounced with it, her pretty little aprons edged with it, her snowy chemisette trimmed with it, so that there was always a demand for what Augustina’s skilful fingers could make.
But now—what was the use of working at the pillow?
The siege which had lasted so long showed no signs of being broken, and no one had any coins to spare on such slight things as lace, when famine was staring the city in the face, and all day long, if one but looked from the window, the wounded could be seen being carried into the convents, or any other place where they could be tended and safe from the cannon balls.
“Is the chocolate sweet enough, mother?” asked Augustina anxiously. She had stirred into it the last spoonful of sugar which they had, and as the purse was running so low she hardly dared to buy any more.
“Sweet enough; and, Augustina, when you go out to-day, go first of all to the cathedral and say an Ave for me. I had hoped before this to be able to go myself. Say, too, a prayer for our brave men who are holding the city against those wicked French.”
“I am going now to Our Lady of the Pillar, mother, and I will stop on the Prado and ask if, by any chance, there has been a call for lace. I have a fine piece ready; the lilies in it seem fairly to grow, do they not, mother?”
Augustina held up with pride a long strip of snowy lace into which were wrought lilies and roses so lifelike that it was almost as if they blossomed.
“I wish that we could afford to keep that piece, Augustina. I have watched it grow under your fingers for so long that I shall miss it when it is no longer here.”
“I shall hate to sell it, mother; yet the money for it would not come amiss, eh, dearest?”