"The knights of old went forth to fight with their lady's glove in their helmet," said Marcelino. "There will be no shivering of lances to-day, yet may I not carry with me some gage of love, to remind me that I fight to-day not for myself nor even for my country alone?"
As he spoke he looked at the fillet of blue silk which bound Magdalen's brown hair. She, with a smile, twisted it from her head and, unfastening it, passed it through the buttonhole of his coat, tying it there in a small bow from which hung two short streamers. Then she stood off to look at him, but shook her head, and going back to his side untied the bow and pulled away the ribbon.
"Wait a minute," she said, shaking back the hair which hung over her face, and then went off to her own room.
Some minutes she was away. When she came back her hair was again bound up with a fillet, but the fillet was no longer a simple blue ribbon, it was of two ribbons, one blue, the other white, twined together. In her hand she carried a blue-and-white rosette, from which hung three streamers, of which the centre one was white, the other two blue. She brought also a needle and thread, and the active fingers stitched the rosette with its three streamers to the lappel of Marcelino's coat.
"There," she said, as she finished her work and stood back to admire it, "there you take not only a gage but an emblem. The sky in the springtime is not blue only, it is blue and white. If you meet with more difficulty than you expect, look on this ribbon, blue and white, and think of the springtime of which you told me."
As Marcelino rode away Magdalen stood in the porch looking after him, till a tall aloe hedge shut him out from her sight, then she seated herself in a low chair with her hands folded before her, gazing vacantly at the raindrops as they fell from the eaves, in deep thought, till the sound of a bell called her to her father's room.
"You have had a visitor this morning, Chica," said Don Alfonso, in a more natural tone than she had heard him speak in for weeks.
"Yes, papa," said she, what little colour she had in her face fading away, and her lips closing firmly together.
"Who was it, Chica?"
"Don Marcelino Ponce de Leon, papa," she answered.