“I am as noble as she is,” he snapped peevishly, and I put him down at once as a very offensive beast.  “And as to being loyal, what is that?  It is being truthful!  It is being faithful!  I know all about her.”

I managed to preserve an air of perfect unconcern.  He wasn’t a fellow to whom one could talk of Dona Rita.

“You are a Basque,” I said.

He admitted rather contemptuously that he was a Basque and even then the truth did not dawn upon me.  I suppose that with the hidden egoism of a lover I was thinking of myself, of myself alone in relation to Dona Rita, not of Dona Rita herself.  He, too, obviously.  He said:  “I am an educated man, but I know her people, all peasants.  There is a sister, an uncle, a priest, a peasant, too, and perfectly unenlightened.  One can’t expect much from a priest (I am a free-thinker of course), but he is really too bad, more like a brute beast.  As to all her people, mostly dead now, they never were of any account.  There was a little land, but they were always working on other people’s farms, a barefooted gang, a starved lot.  I ought to know because we are distant relations.  Twentieth cousins or something of the sort.  Yes, I am related to that most loyal lady.  And what is she, after all, but a Parisian woman with innumerable lovers, as I have been told.”

“I don’t think your information is very correct,” I said, affecting to yawn slightly.  “This is mere gossip of the gutter and I am surprised at you, who really know nothing about it—­”

But the disgusting animal had fallen into a brown study.  The hair of his very whiskers was perfectly still.  I had now given up all idea of the letter to Rita.  Suddenly he spoke again: 

“Women are the origin of all evil.  One should never trust them.  They have no honour.  No honour!” he repeated, striking his breast with his closed fist on which the knuckles stood out very white.  “I left my village many years ago and of course I am perfectly satisfied with my position and I don’t know why I should trouble my head about this loyal lady.  I suppose that’s the way women get on in the world.”

I felt convinced that he was no proper person to be a messenger to headquarters.  He struck me as altogether untrustworthy and perhaps not quite sane.  This was confirmed by him saying suddenly with no visible connection and as if it had been forced from him by some agonizing process:  “I was a boy once,” and then stopping dead short with a smile.  He had a smile that frightened one by its association of malice and anguish.

“Will you have anything more to eat?” I asked.

He declined dully.  He had had enough.  But he drained the last of a bottle into his glass and accepted a cigar which I offered him.  While he was lighting it I had a sort of confused impression that he wasn’t such a stranger to me as I had assumed he was; and yet, on the other hand, I was perfectly certain I had never seen him before.  Next moment I felt that I could have knocked him down if he hadn’t looked so amazingly unhappy, while he came out with the astounding question:  “Senor, have you ever been a lover in your young days?”