The Shadow of the Cathedral. Vicente Blasco Ibanez

guards and the police, spending his nights in ditches, huddled up, his head on his knees, fearing every moment to die of cold.

      He clung to the Cathedral as a shipwrecked and drowning man clings to the spar of a sinking ship; this had been his hope, and he was beginning to realise it. The church would receive him, like an old and infirm mother, unable to smile, but who could still stretch out her arms.

      "At last! At last!" murmured Luna.

      And he smiled, thinking of the world of sorrows and persecutions that he was leaving behind him, as though he were going to some remote place, situated in another planet, from which he would never return; the Cathedral would shelter him for ever.

      In the profound stillness of the cloister, that the sound of the street could not reach, the "companion" Luna thought he heard far off, very far off, the shrill sound of a trumpet and the muffled roll of drums, then he remembered the Alcazar of Toledo, dominating the Cathedral from its height, intimidating it with the enormous mass of its towers; they were the drums and trumpets of the Military Academy.