I didn’t call out after her.  I felt sure that she would return.  I went up slowly to the first floor and met her coming down again, this time carrying a lighted candle.  She had managed to make herself presentable in an extraordinarily short time.

“Oh, my dear young Monsieur, you have given me a fright.”

“Yes.  And I nearly fainted, too,” I said.  “You looked perfectly awful.  What’s the matter with you?  Are you ill?”

She had lighted by then the gas on the landing and I must say that I had never seen exactly that manner of face on her before.  She wriggled, confused and shifty-eyed, before me; but I ascribed this behaviour to her shocked modesty and without troubling myself any more about her feelings I informed her that there was a Carlist downstairs who must be put up for the night.  Most unexpectedly she betrayed a ridiculous consternation, but only for a moment.  Then she assumed at once that I would give him hospitality upstairs where there was a camp-bedstead in my dressing-room.  I said: 

“No.  Give him a shake-down in the studio, where he is now.  It’s warm in there.  And remember!  I charge you strictly not to let him know that I sleep in this house.  In fact, I don’t know myself that I will; I have certain matters to attend to this very night.  You will also have to serve him his coffee in the morning.  I will take him away before ten o’clock.”

All this seemed to impress her more than I had expected.  As usual when she felt curious, or in some other way excited, she assumed a saintly, detached expression, and asked: 

“The dear gentleman is your friend, I suppose?”

“I only know he is a Spaniard and a Carlist,” I said:  “and that ought to be enough for you.”

Instead of the usual effusive exclamations she murmured:  “Dear me, dear me,” and departed upstairs with the candle to get together a few blankets and pillows, I suppose.  As for me I walked quietly downstairs on my way to the studio.  I had a curious sensation that I was acting in a preordained manner, that life was not at all what I had thought it to be, or else that I had been altogether changed sometime during the day, and that I was a different person from the man whom I remembered getting out of my bed in the morning.

Also feelings had altered all their values.  The words, too, had become strange.  It was only the inanimate surroundings that remained what they had always been.  For instance the studio. . . .

During my absence Senor Ortega had taken off his coat and I found him as it were in the air, sitting in his shirt sleeves on a chair which he had taken pains to place in the very middle of the floor.  I repressed an absurd impulse to walk round him as though he had been some sort of exhibit.  His hands were spread over his knees and he looked perfectly insensible.  I don’t mean strange, or ghastly, or wooden, but just insensible—­like an exhibit.