Thus it came about that I was
more and more consulted on my own account. In short, things went so well
with us that in the first six months of my service I added by one third
to the receipts of my master's practice, large as they had been before,
besides lightening his labours not a little.
It was a strange life, and of the things that I saw and learned, could
they be written, I might make a tale indeed, but they have no part in
this history. For it was as though the smiles and silence with which men
and women hide their thoughts were done away, and their hearts spoke to
us in the accents of truth. Now some fair young maid or wife would come
to us with confessions of wickedness that would be thought impossible,
did not her story prove itself; the secret murder perchance of a spouse,
or a lover, or a rival; now some aged dame who would win a husband in
his teens, now some wealthy low-born man or woman, who desired to buy an
alliance with one lacking money, but of noble blood. Such I did not care
to help indeed, but to the love-sick or the love-deluded I listened with
a ready ear, for I had a fellow-feeling with them. Indeed so deep and
earnest was my sympathy that more than once I found the unhappy fair
ready to transfer their affections to my unworthy self, and in fact once
things came about so that, had I willed it, I could have married one of
the loveliest and wealthiest noble ladies of Seville.
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