bed on the couch.  Service of the King!  I must say that she was amiable and didn’t seem to mind anything one asked her to do.  Thus while the fellow slumbered on the divan I would sit upstairs in my room setting down on paper those great words of passion and sorrow that seethed in my brain and even must have forced themselves in murmurs on to my lips, because the man by my side suddenly asked me:  “What did you say?”—­“Nothing,” I answered, very much surprised.  In the shifting light of the street lamps he looked the picture of bodily misery with his chattering teeth and his whiskers blown back flat over his ears.  But somehow he didn’t arouse my compassion.  He was swearing to himself, in French and Spanish, and I tried to soothe him by the assurance that we had not much farther to go.  “I am starving,” he remarked acidly, and I felt a little compunction.  Clearly, the first thing to do was to feed him.  We were then entering the Cannebiere and as I didn’t care to show myself with him in the fashionable restaurant where a new face (and such a face, too) would be remarked, I pulled up the fiacre at the door of the Maison Doree.  That was more of a place of general resort where, in the multitude of casual patrons, he would pass unnoticed.

For this last night of carnival the big house had decorated all its balconies with rows of coloured paper lanterns right up to the roof.  I led the way to the grand salon, for as to private rooms they had been all retained days before.  There was a great crowd of people in costume, but by a piece of good luck we managed to secure a little table in a corner.  The revellers, intent on their pleasure, paid no attention to us.  Senor Ortega trod on my heels and after sitting down opposite me threw an ill-natured glance at the festive scene.  It might have been about half-past ten, then.

Two glasses of wine he drank one after another did not improve his temper.  He only ceased to shiver.  After he had eaten something it must have occurred to him that he had no reason to bear me a grudge and he tried to assume a civil and even friendly manner.  His mouth, however, betrayed an abiding bitterness.  I mean when he smiled.  In repose it was a very expressionless mouth, only it was too red to be altogether ordinary.  The whole of him was like that:  the whiskers too black, the hair too shiny, the forehead too white, the eyes too mobile; and he lent you his attention with an air of eagerness which made you uncomfortable.  He seemed to expect you to give yourself away by some unconsidered word that he would snap up with delight.  It was that peculiarity that somehow put me on my guard.  I had no idea who I was facing across the table and as a matter of fact I did not care.  All my impressions were blurred; and even the promptings of my instinct were the haziest thing imaginable.  Now and then I had acute hallucinations of a woman with an arrow of gold in her hair.  This caused alternate moments