It cannot be denied that Mills seems to have acted somewhat unscrupulously.  He himself appears to have had some doubt about it, at a given moment, as they were driving to the Prado.  But perhaps Mills, with his penetration, understood very well the nature he was dealing with.  He might even have envied it.  But it’s not my business to excuse Mills.  As to him whom we may regard as Mills’ victim it is obvious that he has never harboured a single reproachful thought.  For him Mills is not to be criticized.  A remarkable instance of the great power of mere individuality over the young.

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens.  One of such streets is the Cannebiere, and the jest:  “If Paris had a Cannebiere it would be a little Marseilles” is the jocular expression of municipal pride.  I, too, I have been under the spell.  For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.

There was a part of it where one could see as many as five big cafes in a resplendent row.  That evening I strolled into one of them.  It was by no means full.  It looked deserted, in fact, festal and overlighted, but cheerful.  The wonderful street was distinctly cold (it was an evening of carnival), I was very idle, and I was feeling a little lonely.  So I went in and sat down.

The carnival time was drawing to an end.  Everybody, high and low, was anxious to have the last fling.  Companies of masks with linked arms and whooping like red Indians swept the streets in crazy rushes while gusts of cold mistral swayed the gas lights as far as the eye could reach.  There was a touch of bedlam in all this.

Perhaps it was that which made me feel lonely, since I was neither masked, nor disguised, nor yelling, nor in any other way in harmony with the bedlam element of life.  But I was not sad.  I was merely in a state of sobriety.  I had just returned from my second West Indies voyage.  My eyes were still full of tropical splendour, my memory of my experiences, lawful and lawless, which had their charm and their thrill; for they had startled me a little and had amused me considerably.  But they had left me untouched.  Indeed they were other men’s adventures, not mine.  Except for a little habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had not matured me.  I was as young as before.  Inconceivably young—­still beautifully unthinking—­infinitely receptive.

You may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight for a kingdom.  Why should I?  You don’t want to think of things which you meet every day in the newspapers and in conversation.  I had paid some calls since my return and most of my acquaintance were legitimists and intensely interested in the events of the frontier of Spain, for political, religious, or romantic reasons.  But I was not interested.  Apparently I was not romantic enough.  Or was it that I was even more romantic than all those good people?  The affair seemed to me commonplace.  That man was attending to his business of a Pretender.