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“When will your father return?” asked Don Felipe.

“I do not know; but it will be soon, I think.”

As Diego spoke there was a sound of clattering hoofs on the stones of the courtyard.

“That is my father!” said Diego.

At that moment Fray Piña turned from the parapet and entered the room. Instantly both lads bent over their books as if they had no thought but study. Fray Piña smiled slightly; they had not looked at a book since their tutor had been out of the room.

Fray Piña took up a treatise on mathematics and began to question the two boys. Neither of them did very well, their thoughts being with the Admiral in the courtyard and the news he might bring from Granada, where the siege of the Moorish city was in progress, and the success he might have had with the Spanish sovereigns. But Fray Piña went on relentlessly. Diego felt as if he could scarcely remain in his seat; and Don Felipe’s eyes wandered everywhere, his wits going with his eyes. At last a knock was heard at the door, and the ruddy, good-natured, boyish face of Brother Lawrence, the young lay brother who worked in the garden and milked the cows and attended to the mules, appeared at the door.