He looked along the avenue of revellers that had turned grinning to see how his English stiffness would meet the occasion, and saw poor Leonore.  She was sitting on the table, one hand holding her pink wrapper to her breast and the other patting back a yawn, and her nightdress was pulled down to her waist so that her back was bare.  Such a broad, honest back it was, for she was the thick type of Frenchwoman, and might have stood as a model for Millet’s “Angelus.”  She looked over her shoulder and smiled at him benignantly, perplexedly, and he saw that she was unhappy.  They had fetched her down from her warm bed, whither doubtless she had gone with hopes of having a good night’s rest for once, since Hermes was giving a stag-dinner.  They had not even given her time to wipe off all the cold cream, some of which lay in an ooze round her jaw and temples, or to take the curl-papers out of her hair, which still sported some white snippets of the Jornal de Commercio.  She bore no malice, the good soul was saying to herself, but once a woman is in her bed she likes to stay there:  still, men are men, and mad, so what can one expect?

He would not treat her lightly, nor spoil his sense of dedication to one woman.  He flicked the revolver out of Pessoa’s hand and flung it through the nearest window.  The thick glass took a little time to fall.

“My friends will wait on you in the morning,” Pessoa had spouted, and he had said the appropriate courteous things, and gone up to Leonore, and kissed her hand and said something chaffing in her ear, at which she smiled sleepily, and said in English, “Go on, you bad man!” She spoke so slowly and so meaninglessly, as stupid people do when they speak a foreign tongue, that the words seemed to be uttered by some lonely ghost that had found a lodging in her broad mouth.  Then the men fell back to let him go out through the folding-doors, and he went out into the Moorish arches of the entrance-hall, where Indian flunkeys in purple livery gave him his coat and hat, and he set his back to this queer mass of cupolas and towers, that radiated from its uncurtained windows rays of light which were pollutions of the moonlight.  He thought of that blotched face, that gross, full body....  It was a night of strong moonlight.  He was walking along a dazzling white causeway edged, where the wall cast its shadow, with a ribbon of blackness.  Palms stood up glittering, touched by the moon to something madder than their daylight fantasy of form.  The aluminium-painted railings in front of de Rojas’ villa gleamed like the spears of heroes.  He stared between them at the red facade; if she was a coward she would still be somewhere in there.  The thought struck him with terror.  If she were not waiting for him the moonlight would shatter and turn to darkness, the violence of his heart-beat turn to stillness.