“Why do you return that woman’s salutation?” he at once asked Marianne.

“I need her.  She has done me services.”

“That is surprising!  I thought her incapable of doing anything but harm.”

He did not dream of Mademoiselle Kayser’s coming in contact with courtesans.  In the tiny, virtuous room in Rue Cuvier, Rosas thought that Marianne was in her true surroundings.  She would frequently sit at the piano—­one of the few pieces of furniture contained in this apartment,—­and play for Rosas Oriental melodies that would transport him far away in thought, to the open desert, by the slow lulling of David’s Caravane, then abruptly change to that familiar air, that rondeau of the Varietes that he hummed yonder, on his dunghill, forsaken—­

    “Voyez-vous, la-bas,
    Cette maison blanche—­”

“I love that music-hall air!” she said.

He now no longer meditated resuming travel, or quitting Paris.  Mademoiselle Kayser’s hold on him grew more certain every day.  The suspicion of odd mystery that enveloped this girl intensified his passion.

He sometimes asked her what her uncle was doing.

“He?  Why, he has obtained, thanks to Monsieur Vaudrey, the decoration of a hydropathic establishment, Les Thermes des Batignolles.  He has commenced the cartoon for a fresco:  Massage Moralizing the People.  We shall see that in his studio.”

“Do you know,” Marianne continued, “what I would like to see?”

“What, then?”

“Spain, your own country.  Where were you born, Rosas?”

“At Toledo.  I own the family chateau there.”

“With portraits and armor?”

“Yes, with portraits and armor.”

“Well, I would like to go to Toledo, to see that chateau.  It must be magnificent.”

“It is gloomy, simply gloomy.  A fortress on a rock.  Gray stone, a red rock, scorched by the sun.  Huge halls half Moorish in style.  Walls as thick as those of a prison.  Steel knights, standing with lance in hand as in Eviradnus!  Old portraits of stern ancestors cramped in their doublets, or Duchesses de Rosas, with pale faces, sad countenances, buried in their collars whose guipures have been limned by Velasquez or Claude Coello.  Immense cold rooms where the visitors’ footfalls echo as over empty tombs.  A splendor that savors of the vault.  You would die of ennui at the end of two hours and of cold at the end of eight days.”

“Die of cold in Spain?”

“There is a cold of the soul,” the duke replied with a significant smile.  “That I have travelled so much, is probably due to my desire to escape from that place!  But you at Toledo, at Fuentecarral,—­that is the name of my castle,—­a Parisian like you!  It would be cruel.  As well shut up a humming-bird in a bear-pit.  No! thank God, I have other nooks in Spain that will shelter us, my dear sparrow of the boulevards!  Under the Andalusian jasmines, beneath