One day they said to her:
"Eat and live, and you will be set free to-morrow."
She turned for the first time, and lifted her face from the straw in which she buried it, and looked them in the eyes.
"Is that true?" she asked.
"Ay," they answered her. "We swear it by the cross of our blessed Master."
"If a Christian swear it,—it must be a lie," she said, with the smile that froze their timid blood.
But she accepted the food and the drink which they brought her, and broke her fast, and slept through many hours; strengthened, as by strong wine, by that one hope of freedom beneath the wide pure skies.
She asked them on awakening what the season of the year was then. They told her it was the early spring.
"The spring," she echoed dully,—all the months were a blank to her, which had rolled by since that red autumn evening when in the cell of the guard-house the voice of Taric had chanted in drink and delirium the passion songs of Spain.
"Yes. It is spring," they said again; and one sister, younger and gentler than the rest, reached from its place above the crucifix the bough of the golden catkins of the willow, which served them at their holy season as an emblem of the palms of Palestine.