He kept his voice equably low.  It was a lonely spot and but for a vague shape of a dwarf tree here and there we had only the flying clouds for company.  Very far off a tiny light twinkled a little way up the seaward shoulder of an invisible mountain.  Dominic moved on.

“Fancy yourself lying here, on this wild spot, with a leg smashed by a shot or perhaps with a bullet in your side.  It might happen.  A star might fall.  I have watched stars falling in scores on clear nights in the Atlantic.  And it was nothing.  The flash of a pinch of gunpowder in your face may be a bigger matter.  Yet somehow it’s pleasant as we stumble in the dark to think of our Senora in that long room with a shiny floor and all that lot of glass at the end, sitting on that divan, you call it, covered with carpets as if expecting a king indeed.  And very still . . .”

He remembered her—­whose image could not be dismissed.

I laid my hand on his shoulder.

“That light on the mountain side flickers exceedingly, Dominic.  Are we in the path?”

He addressed me then in French, which was between us the language of more formal moments.

“Prenez mon bras, monsieur.  Take a firm hold, or I will have you stumbling again and falling into one of those beastly holes, with a good chance to crack your head.  And there is no need to take offence.  For, speaking with all respect, why should you, and I with you, be here on this lonely spot, barking our shins in the dark on the way to a confounded flickering light where there will be no other supper but a piece of a stale sausage and a draught of leathery wine out of a stinking skin.  Pah!”

I had good hold of his arm.  Suddenly he dropped the formal French and pronounced in his inflexible voice: 

“For a pair of white arms, Senor.  Bueno.”

He could understand.

CHAPTER III

On our return from that expedition we came gliding into the old harbour so late that Dominic and I, making for the cafe kept by Madame Leonore, found it empty of customers, except for two rather sinister fellows playing cards together at a corner table near the door.  The first thing done by Madame Leonore was to put her hands on Dominic’s shoulders and look at arm’s length into the eyes of that man of audacious deeds and wild stratagems who smiled straight at her from under his heavy and, at that time, uncurled moustaches.

Indeed we didn’t present a neat appearance, our faces unshaven, with the traces of dried salt sprays on our smarting skins and the sleeplessness of full forty hours filming our eyes.  At least it was so with me who saw as through a mist Madame Leonore moving with her mature nonchalant grace, setting before us wine and glasses with a faint swish of her ample black skirt.  Under the elaborate structure of black hair her jet-black eyes sparkled like good-humoured