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When dinner was over, the two youths expected, as usual, to be given an hour’s recreation in the sunny orchard in which was a fish-pond, that was Diego’s delight. But he was bitterly disappointed when Fray Piña said to him:

“It was this day a week ago that you and Don Felipe raced the mules. Let us go up to the study now and spend that wasted hour in mathematics.”

Diego and Don Felipe exchanged rueful glances, but said nothing. Fray Piña had a deadly ingenuity in paying off for all their pranks, and had no doubt waited for this day when the orchard and the fish-pond and the blue sky called to the lads, “Come and be happy.” Instead, however, of talking and fishing and frolicking, as they usually did at that hour, the two lads spent the time being put through their paces by Fray Piña. By the time they had answered one question another was propounded, and the blackboard in the tower room was covered with figures. It was a sort of mental exercise for Fray Piña himself, and when the hour was over Diego and Don Felipe were thoroughly tired out with hard work and incessant figuring.