miraculous voyage over the sea.

The beautiful lady smiled slightly, as she listened. The maid was all
ears, not to lose a word of a language she but half understood, her
credulous peasant eyes traveling from the Virgin to the hermit and from
the hermit to the Virgin, plainly expressing the wonder she was feeling
at such a portentous miracle. Rafael had followed the party into the
shrine and taken a position near the fascinating stranger. She, however,
pretended not to see him.

"That is only a legend," he ventured to remark, when the rustic had
finished his story. "You understand, of course, that nobody hereabouts
accepts such tales as true."

"I suppose so," the lady answered coldly.

"Legend or no legend, don Rafael," the recluse grumbled, somewhat
peeved, "that's what my grandfather and all the folk of his day used to
say; and that's what people still believe. If the story has been handed
down so long, there must be something to it."

The patch of sunlight that shone through the doorway upon the flagstones
was darkened by the shadow of a woman. It was a poorly clad orchard
worker, young, it seemed, but with a face pale, and as rough as wrinkled
paper, all the crevices and hollows of her cranium showing, her eyes
sunken and dull, her unkempt hair escaping from beneath her knotted
kerchief. She was barefoot, carrying her shoes in her hand. She stood
with her legs wide apart, as if in an effort to keep her balance. She
seemed to feel intense pain whenever she stepped upon the ground.
Illness and poverty were written on every feature of her person.