"Yes?" said Maria Dolores, with interest, as he paused.
"When we came out of church, I asked Annunziata who he was," continued John. "And she said that though she had kept her eyes open, according to my injunction, she had failed to see any one kneeling beside me--that, on the contrary, she had seen me," he concluded, with an insouciance that was plainly assumed for its dramatic value, "kneeling alone, at a distance from every one."
Maria Dolores' face was white. She frowned her mystification.
"What!" she exclaimed, in a half-frightened voice.
"That is precisely the ejaculation that fell from my own lips at the time," said John. "Then I gave her a minute description of the old man, in all his ugliness. And then she administered my lesson to me."
"Yes? What was it?" questioned Maria Dolores, her interest acute.
"Speaking in that oracular vein of hers, her eyes very big, her face very grave, she assured me that my horrible old man had no objective existence. She informed me cheerfully and calmly that he was an image of my own soul, as it appeared, corrupted and aged and deformed by the sins of a lifetime, to God and to the Saints. And she added that he was sent to punish me for my pride in thinking myself different to the common people, and in seeking to hold myself aloof. Since then," John brought his anecdote to a term, "I have always knelt in the body of the church, and I have never again seen my Doppelgänger."
Maria Dolores was silent for a little. They had come to the southern end of the cloisters, where the buttresses of the Castle walls, all shaggy-mantled in a green overgrowth of creepers, fall precipitously away, down the steep face of a natural cliff. They stopped here, and stood looking off. The rain had held up, though the valley was still misty with its vapours. Whiffs of velvety air, warm and sweet, blew in their faces, lightly stirred the dark hair about her brow, and, catching the flowery edge of her black lace mantilla, set it fluttering.
"That is a very good story," she said, by-and-by, with a sober glance, behind which there was the glint of laughter. "In view of it, however, I suppose there will be no use in my delivering a message I am charged with for you from my friend Frau Brandt."