“Oh, yes,” I said, “I have nothing to do and even nothing to think of just now, I will meet your man as he gets off the train at ten o’clock to-night.  What’s he like?”

“Oh, he has a black moustache and whiskers, and his chin is shaved,” said the newly-fledged baron cordially.  “A very honest fellow.  I always found him very useful.  His name is Jose Ortega.”

He was perfectly self-possessed now, and walking soft-footed accompanied me to the door of the room.  He shook hands with a melancholy smile.  “This is a very frightful situation.  My poor wife will be quite distracted.  She is such a patriot.  Many thanks, Don George.  You relieve me greatly.  The fellow is rather stupid and rather bad-tempered.  Queer creature, but very honest!  Oh, very honest!”

CHAPTER IV

It was the last evening of Carnival.  The same masks, the same yells, the same mad rushes, the same bedlam of disguised humanity blowing about the streets in the great gusts of mistral that seemed to make them dance like dead leaves on an earth where all joy is watched by death.

It was exactly twelve months since that other carnival evening when I had felt a little weary and a little lonely but at peace with all mankind.  It must have been—­to a day or two.  But on this evening it wasn’t merely loneliness that I felt.  I felt bereaved with a sense of a complete and universal loss in which there was perhaps more resentment than mourning; as if the world had not been taken away from me by an august decree but filched from my innocence by an underhand fate at the very moment when it had disclosed to my passion its warm and generous beauty.  This consciousness of universal loss had this advantage that it induced something resembling a state of philosophic indifference.  I walked up to the railway station caring as little for the cold blasts of wind as though I had been going to the scaffold.  The delay of the train did not irritate me in the least.  I had finally made up my mind to write a letter to Dona Rita; and this “honest fellow” for whom I was waiting would take it to her.  He would have no difficulty in Tolosa in finding Madame de Lastaola.  The General Headquarters, which was also a Court, would be buzzing with comments on her presence.  Most likely that “honest fellow” was already known to Dona Rita.  For all I knew he might have been her discovery just as I was.  Probably I, too, was regarded as an “honest fellow” enough; but stupid—­since it was clear that my luck was not inexhaustible.  I hoped that while carrying my letter the man would not let himself be caught by some Alphonsist guerilla who would, of course, shoot him.  But why should he?  I, for instance, had escaped with my life from a much more dangerous enterprise than merely passing through the frontier line in charge of some trustworthy guide.  I pictured the fellow to myself trudging over the stony slopes