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“You are where I have always hoped to see you,” she said in a low tone; “but beware of a too indiscriminate zeal. They say Comonfort himself has been too hasty, must draw back—retract—”

“Retract!” cried Vicente. “Never! Down, I say, with these tyrants in priestly garments,—these robbers in the guise of saints! The land is overrun with them; their dwellings rise in hundreds in the sunlight of prosperity, and the hovels of the poor are covered in the darkness of their oppressions. The finest lands, the richest mines, the wealth of whole families have passed into their cunning and grasping hands. There is no right, either temporal or spiritual, but is controlled by them. Better let us be lost eternally than be saved by such a clergy. What, saved by bull-baiters, cock-fighters, the deluders of the widow and orphan, the oppressors of the poor!”

“You are bitter and unjust,” interrupted Doña Feliz; “remember, too, the base ministers of the Church take nothing from the sanctity of her ordinances.”