“Excuse the liberty I take,” said he, with a singularly winning smile; “but let me advise you not to smoke that cigar.  I have a peculiarly sensitive nose for tobacco, and my nose informs me that your cigar, though good as cigars go, is not fit for you to smoke.”

The young officer was surprised that he was rather charmed than offended by this impertinence.

“Let me offer you one of these instead,” said the strange gentleman; “we call them—­I won’t trouble you with the Spanish name—­but in English it means ‘Joys of Spain.’”

The officer took and thanked him for a “Joy of Spain,” and found the flavour and aroma so excellent that, to use his own phrase, he could have eaten it.  He asked the stranger what in particular was his objection to the other cigar.

“This objection,” said he, “which is common to all ill-prepared tobaccos, that it lowers the vital force.  You don’t feel that yet, because you are young and healthy, and gifted with a superabundance of fine vitality; but you may by smoking one bad cigar bring the time a day nearer when you must feel it.  And even now it would take a little off the keen edge of the appetite for pleasure.  How little,” said he, “do we understand how to keep ourselves in condition for the complete enjoyment of life!  You, I suppose, are about to take your pleasure in town, and instead of judiciously tickling and stimulating your nerves for the complete fulfilment of the pleasures you contemplate, you begin—­you were beginning, I mean, with your own cigar—­to dull and stupefy them.  Don’t you see how foolish that is?”

The young officer admitted that it was very foolish and very true; and they talked on thus, the elder exercising a charm over the younger such as he had never known before in the society of any man.  In a quarter of an hour the young man felt as if he had known and trusted and loved his neighbour all his life; he felt, he confessed, so strongly attracted that he could have hugged him.  He told him about his family, and showed him the innermost secrets of his heart; and all the while he smoked the delicious “Joy of Spain,” and felt more and more enthralled and fascinated by the stranger’s eyes, which, as he talked, lightened and glowed more and more as their glance played caressingly about him.  He was beginning to wonder at that, when with some emphatic phrase the stranger laid his fingers on his knee, upon which a thrill shot through him as if a woman had touched him.  He looked in the stranger’s face, and the wonderful eyes seemed to search to the root of his being, and to draw the soul out of him.  He had a flying thought—­“Can it be a woman, after all, in this strange shape?” and he knew no more ... till he woke in the hospital bed.

That was the patient’s story.

“Just look over your property here,” said the doctor.  “Have you lost anything?”

The young man turned over his watch and the contents of his purse, and answered that he had lost nothing.