What was most amusing was the cool, reasonable tone of this amazing project.  Mr. Blunt sat by very detached, his eyes roamed here and there all over the cafe; and it was while looking upward at the pink foot of a fleshy and very much foreshortened goddess of some sort depicted on the ceiling in an enormous composition in the Italian style that he let fall casually the words, “She will manage it for you quite easily.”

“Every Carlist agent in Bayonne assured me of that,” said Mr. Mills.  “I would have gone straight to Paris only I was told she had fled here for a rest; tired, discontented.  Not a very encouraging report.”

“These flights are well known,” muttered Mr. Blunt.  “You shall see her all right.”

“Yes.  They told me that you . . . "

I broke in:  “You mean to say that you expect a woman to arrange that sort of thing for you?”

“A trifle, for her,” Mr. Blunt remarked indifferently.  “At that sort of thing women are best.  They have less scruples.”

“More audacity,” interjected Mr. Mills almost in a whisper.

Mr. Blunt kept quiet for a moment, then:  “You see,” he addressed me in a most refined tone, “a mere man may suddenly find himself being kicked down the stairs.”

I don’t know why I should have felt shocked by that statement.  It could not be because it was untrue.  The other did not give me time to offer any remark.  He inquired with extreme politeness what did I know of South American republics?  I confessed that I knew very little of them.  Wandering about the Gulf of Mexico I had a look-in here and there; and amongst others I had a few days in Haiti which was of course unique, being a negro republic.  On this Captain Blunt began to talk of negroes at large.  He talked of them with knowledge, intelligence, and a sort of contemptuous affection.  He generalized, he particularized about the blacks; he told anecdotes.  I was interested, a little incredulous, and considerably surprised.  What could this man with such a boulevardier exterior that he looked positively like, an exile in a provincial town, and with his drawing-room manner—­what could he know of negroes?

Mills, sitting silent with his air of watchful intelligence, seemed to read my thoughts, waved his pipe slightly and explained:  “The Captain is from South Carolina.”

“Oh,” I murmured, and then after the slightest of pauses I heard the second of Mr. J. K. Blunt’s declarations.

“Yes,” he said.  “Je suis Americain, catholique et gentil-homme,” in a tone contrasting so strongly with the smile, which, as it were, underlined the uttered words, that I was at a loss whether to return the smile in kind or acknowledge the words with a grave little bow.  Of course I did neither and there fell on us an odd, equivocal silence.  It marked our final abandonment of the French language.  I was the one to speak first, proposing that my companions