He did not distrust Lopez Baeza.  All the work which Baeza had done for him had, indeed, been faithfully and discreetly done.  But—­but there was always a certain amount of money for the man who would work the double cross—­not so very much, but still, a certain amount.  And Hillyard was always upon his guard against the intrusion of a contempt for the German effort.  That contempt was easy enough for a man who, having read year after year of the wonders of the loud-vaunted German system of espionage, had come fresh from his reading into contact with the actual agents.  Their habit of lining their pockets at the expense of their Government, their unfulfilled pretensions, their vanity and extravagance, and, above all, their unimaginative stupidity in their estimation of men—­these things were apt in the early years of the war to bewilder the man who had been so often told to fall down before the great idol of German efficiency.

“The German agent works on the assumption that the mind of every foreigner reasons on German lines, but with inferior intelligence.  But behind the agent is the cunning of Berlin, with its long-deliberated plans and its concocted ingenuity of method.  And though on the whole they are countered, as with amazement they admit, by the amateurs from England, still every now and then—­not very often—­they do bring something off.”

Thus Hillyard reasoned as he turned the corner of the Plaza Cataluna into the wide Rambla.  It might be that the narratives of Pontiana Tabor and the denials of Ramon Castillo were all just part of one little subsidiary plan in the German scheme which was to reach its achievement by putting an inconvenient Englishman out of the way for good in one of the dark, narrow side streets of Barcelona.

After the hot day the Rambla, with its broad tree-shaded alley in the middle, its carriage-ways on each side of the alley, and its shops and footwalks beyond the carriage-ways, was crowded with loiterers.  The Spaniard, to our ideas, is simple in his pleasure.  To visit a cinematograph, to take a cooling temperance drink at the Municipal Kiosque at the top of the Rambla, and to pace up and down the broad walk with unending chatter—­until daybreak—­here were the joys of Barcelona folk in the days of summer.  Further down at the lower end of the Rambla you would come upon the dancing halls and supper-cafes, with separate rooms for the national gambling game, “Siete y Media,” but they had their own clientele amongst the bloods and the merchant captains from the harbour.  The populace of Barcelona walked the Rambla under the great globes of electric light.

Hillyard could only move slowly through the press.  Every one dawdled.  Hillyard dawdled too.  He passed the Opera House, and a little further down saw across the carriage-way, Lopez Baeza in front of a lighted tobacco shop at the corner of a narrow street.  Hillyard crossed the carriage-way and Baeza turned into the street, a narrow thoroughfare between tall houses and dark as a cavern.  Hillyard followed him.  The lights of the Rambla were left behind, the houses became more slatternly and disreputable, the smells of the quarter were of rancid food and bad drains.  Before a great door Baeza stopped and clapped his hands.