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"En los talleres y arsenales

a guerra! todos, tocan ya;"

Hugh sang resignedly, in a deep voice.

"--and it was the same way when I first met him in Granada. We made an appointment for dinner in a place near the Alhambra and I thought he'd meant us to meet in the Alhambra, and I couldn't find him and now it's me, looking for him again--on my first night back."

"--todas, tocan ya;

morir ¿quién quiere por la gloria

o por vendedores de cañones?"

Thunder volleyed through the forest, and Yvonne almost stopped dead again, half imagining she had seen, for an instant, beckoning her on at the end of the path, the fixedly smiling woman with the lottery tickets.

"How much farther?" Hugh asked.

"We're nearly there, I think. There's a couple of turns in the path ahead and a fallen log we have to climb over."

"Adelante, la juventud,

al asalto, vamos ya,

y contra los imperialismos,

para un nuevo mundo hacer.

I guess you were right then," Hugh said.

There was a lull in the storm that for Yvonne, looking up at the dark treetops' long slow swaying in the wind against the tempestuous sky, was a moment like that of the tide's turning, and yet that was filled with some quality of this morning's ride with Hugh, some night essence of their shared morning thoughts, with a wild sea-yearning of youth and love and sorrow.

A sharp pistol-like report, from somewhere ahead, as of a back-firing car, broke this swaying stillness, followed by another and another. "More target practice," Hugh laughed; yet these were different mundane sounds to hold as a relief against the sickening thunder that followed, for they meant Parián was near, soon its dim lights would gleam through the trees: by a lightning flash bright as day they had seen a sad useless arrow pointing back the way they'd come, to the burned Anochtitlán: and now, in the profounder gloom, Hugh's own light fell across a tree trunk on the left side where a wooden sign with a pointing hand confirmed their direction.

A PARIÁN ?

Hugh was singing behind her... It began to rain softly and a sweet cleanly smell rose from the woods. And now, here was the place where the path doubled back on itself, only to be blocked by a huge moss-covered bole that divided it from that very same path she had decided against, which the Consul must have taken beyond Tomalín. The mildewed ladder with its wide-spaced rungs mounted against the near side of the bole was still there, and Yvonne had clambered up it almost before she realized she had lost Hugh's light. Yvonne balanced herself someway on top of this dark slippery log and saw his light again, a little to one side, moving among the trees. She said with a certain note of triumph:

"Mind you don't get off the path there, Hugh, it's sort of tricky. And mind the fallen log. There's a ladder up this side, but you have to jump down on the other."

"Jump then," said Hugh. "I must have got off your path." Yvonne, hearing the plangent complaint of his guitar as Hugh banged the case, called: "Here I am, over here."

"Hijos del pueblo que oprimen cadenas

esa injusticia no debe existir

si tu existencia es un mundo de penas

antes que esclavo, prefiere morir prefiere morir."

Hugh was singing ironically.

All at once the rain fell more heavily. A wind like an express train swept through the forest; just ahead lightning struck through the trees with a savage tearing and roar of thunder that shook the earth--

There is, sometimes in thunder, another person who thinks for you, takes in one's mental porch furniture, shuts and bolts the mind's window against what seems less appalling as a threat than as some distortion of celestial privacy, a shattering insanity in heaven, a form of disgrace forbidden mortals to observe too closely: but there is always a door left open in the mind--as men have been known in great thunderstorms to leave their real doors open for Jesus to walk in--for the entrance and the reception of the unprecedented, the fearful acceptance