The new young gentleman within Therese’s horizon didn’t surprise me very much.  Villarel would travel with some sort of suite, a couple of secretaries at least.  I had heard enough of Carlist headquarters to know that the man had been (very likely was still) Captain General of the Royal Bodyguard and was a person of great political (and domestic) influence at Court.  The card was, under its social form, a mere command to present myself before the grandee.  No Royalist devoted by conviction, as I must have appeared to him, could have mistaken the meaning.  I put the card in my pocket and after dining or not dining—­I really don’t remember—­spent the evening smoking in the studio, pursuing thoughts of tenderness and grief, visions exalting and cruel.  From time to time I looked at the dummy.  I even got up once from the couch on which I had been writhing like a worm and walked towards it as if to touch it, but refrained, not from sudden shame but from sheer despair.  By and by Therese drifted in.  It was then late and, I imagine, she was on her way to bed.  She looked the picture of cheerful, rustic innocence and started propounding to me a conundrum which began with the words: 

“If our Rita were to die before long . . .”

She didn’t get any further because I had jumped up and frightened her by shouting:  “Is she ill?  What has happened?  Have you had a letter?”

She had had a letter.  I didn’t ask her to show it to me, though I daresay she would have done so.  I had an idea that there was no meaning in anything, at least no meaning that mattered.  But the interruption had made Therese apparently forget her sinister conundrum.  She observed me with her shrewd, unintelligent eyes for a bit, and then with the fatuous remark about the Law being just she left me to the horrors of the studio.  I believe I went to sleep there from sheer exhaustion.  Some time during the night I woke up chilled to the bone and in the dark.  These were horrors and no mistake.  I dragged myself upstairs to bed past the indefatigable statuette holding up the ever-miserable light.  The black-and-white hall was like an ice-house.

The main consideration which induced me to call on the Marquis of Villarel was the fact that after all I was a discovery of Dona Rita’s, her own recruit.  My fidelity and steadfastness had been guaranteed by her and no one else.  I couldn’t bear the idea of her being criticized by every empty-headed chatterer belonging to the Cause.  And as, apart from that, nothing mattered much, why, then—­ I would get this over.