“I suppose Alphonso and Carlos, Carlos and Alphonso, they are nothing to you, together or separately?”

I said:  “Dominic, if they were both to vanish from the earth together or separately it would make no difference to my feelings.”

He remarked:  “Just so.  A man mourns only for his friends.  I suppose they are no more friends to you than they are to me.  Those Carlists make a great consumption of cartridges.  That is well.  But why should we do all those mad things that you will insist on us doing till my hair,” he pursued with grave, mocking exaggeration, “till my hair tries to stand up on my head? and all for that Carlos, let God and the devil each guard his own, for that Majesty as they call him, but after all a man like another and—­no friend.”

“Yes, why?” I murmured, feeling my body nestled at ease in the sand.

It was very dark under the overhanging rock on that night of clouds and of wind that died and rose and died again.  Dominic’s voice was heard speaking low between the short gusts.

“Friend of the Senora, eh?”

“That’s what the world says, Dominic.”

“Half of what the world says are lies,” he pronounced dogmatically.  “For all his majesty he may be a good enough man.  Yet he is only a king in the mountains and to-morrow he may be no more than you.  Still a woman like that—­one, somehow, would grudge her to a better king.  She ought to be set up on a high pillar for people that walk on the ground to raise their eyes up to.  But you are otherwise, you gentlemen.  You, for instance, Monsieur, you wouldn’t want to see her set up on a pillar.”

“That sort of thing, Dominic,” I said, “that sort of thing, you understand me, ought to be done early.”

He was silent for a time.  And then his manly voice was heard in the shadow of the rock.

“I see well enough what you mean.  I spoke of the multitude, that only raise their eyes.  But for kings and suchlike that is not enough.  Well, no heart need despair; for there is not a woman that wouldn’t at some time or other get down from her pillar for no bigger bribe perhaps than just a flower which is fresh to-day and withered to-morrow.  And then, what’s the good of asking how long any woman has been up there?  There is a true saying that lips that have been kissed do not lose their freshness.”

I don’t know what answer I could have made.  I imagine Dominic thought himself unanswerable.  As a matter of fact, before I could speak, a voice came to us down the face of the rock crying secretly, “Ola, down there!  All is safe ashore.”

It was the boy who used to hang about the stable of a muleteer’s inn in a little shallow valley with a shallow little stream in it, and where we had been hiding most of the day before coming down to the shore.  We both started to our feet and Dominic said, “A good boy that.  You didn’t hear him either come or go above our heads.  Don’t reward him with more than one peseta, Senor, whatever he does.  If you were to give him two he would go mad at the sight of so much wealth and throw up his job at the Fonda, where he is so useful to run errands, in that way he has of skimming along the paths without displacing a stone.”