“What do you mean?” I asked.  “How old do you think I am?”

“That’s true,” he said, gazing at me in a way in which the damned gaze out of their cauldrons of boiling pitch at some soul walking scot free in the place of torment.  “It’s true, you don’t seem to have anything on your mind.”  He assumed an air of ease, throwing an arm over the back of his chair and blowing the smoke through the gash of his twisted red mouth.  “Tell me,” he said, “between men, you know, has this—­wonderful celebrity—­what does she call herself?  How long has she been your mistress?”

I reflected rapidly that if I knocked him over, chair and all, by a sudden blow from the shoulder it would bring about infinite complications beginning with a visit to the Commissaire de Police on night-duty, and ending in God knows what scandal and disclosures of political kind; because there was no telling what, or how much, this outrageous brute might choose to say and how many people he might not involve in a most undesirable publicity.  He was smoking his cigar with a poignantly mocking air and not even looking at me.  One can’t hit like that a man who isn’t even looking at one; and then, just as I was looking at him swinging his leg with a caustic smile and stony eyes, I felt sorry for the creature.  It was only his body that was there in that chair.  It was manifest to me that his soul was absent in some hell of its own.  At that moment I attained the knowledge of who it was I had before me.  This was the man of whom both Dona Rita and Rose were so much afraid.  It remained then for me to look after him for the night and then arrange with Baron H. that he should be sent away the very next day—­and anywhere but to Tolosa.  Yes, evidently, I mustn’t lose sight of him.  I proposed in the calmest tone that we should go on where he could get his much-needed rest.  He rose with alacrity, picked up his little hand-bag, and, walking out before me, no doubt looked a very ordinary person to all eyes but mine.  It was then past eleven, not much, because we had not been in that restaurant quite an hour, but the routine of the town’s night-life being upset during the Carnival the usual row of fiacres outside the Maison Doree was not there; in fact, there were very few carriages about.  Perhaps the coachmen had assumed Pierrot costumes and were rushing about the streets on foot yelling with the rest of the population.  “We will have to walk,” I said after a while.—­“Oh, yes, let us walk,” assented Senor Ortega, “or I will be frozen here.”  It was like a plaint of unutterable wretchedness.  I had a fancy that all his natural heat had abandoned his limbs and gone to his brain.  It was otherwise with me; my head was cool but I didn’t find the night really so very cold.  We stepped out briskly side by side.  My lucid thinking was, as it were, enveloped by the wide shouting of the consecrated Carnival gaiety.  I have heard many noises since, but nothing that gave me such an intimate impression