But a truce to reality!  Let us return to Di Sorno.

This individual does not become enamoured of Gwendolen, as the crude novel reader might anticipate.  He answers her “coldly,” and his eye rests the while on her “tirewoman, the sweet Margot.”  Then come scenes of jealousy and love, outside a castle with heavily mullioned windows.  The sweet Margot, though she turns out to be the daughter of a bankrupt prince, has one characteristic of your servant all the world over—­she spends all her time looking out of the window.  Di Sorno tells her of his love on the evening of the bull-fight, and she cheerfully promises to “learn to love him,” and therafter he spends all his days and nights “spurring his fiery steed down the road” that leads by the castle containing the young scholar.  It becomes a habit with him—­in all, he does it seventeen times in three chapters.  Then, “ere it is too late,” he implores Margot to fly.

Gwendolen, after a fiery scene with Margot, in which she calls her a “petty minion,”—­pretty language for a young gentlewoman,—­“sweeps with unutterable scorn from the room,” never, to the reader’s huge astonishment, to appear in the story again, and Margot flies with Di Sorno to Grenada, where the Inquisition, consisting apparently of a single monk with a “blazing eye,” becomes extremely machinatory.  A certain Countess di Morno, who intends to marry Di Sorno, and who has been calling into the story in a casual kind of way since the romance began, now comes prominently forward.  She has denounced Margot for heresy, and at a masked ball the Inquisition, disguised in a yellow domino, succeeds in separating the young couple, and in carrying off “the sweet Margot” to a convent.

“Di Sorno, half distraught, flung himself into a cab and drove to all the hotels in Grenada” (he overlooked the police station), and, failing to find Margot, becomes mad.  He goes about ejaculating “Mad, mad!” than which nothing could be more eloquent of his complete mental inversion.  In his paroxysms the Countess di Morno persuades him to “lead her to the altar,” but on the way (with a certain indelicacy they go to church in the same conveyance) she lets slip a little secret.  So Di Sorno jumps out of the carriage, “hurling the crowd apart,” and, “flourishing his drawn sword,” “clamoured at the gate of the Inquisition” for Margot.  The Inquisition, represented by the fiery-eyed monk, “looked over the gate at him.”  No doubt it felt extremely uncomfortable.

Now it was just at this thrilling part that Euphemia came home, and the trouble about the flattened hat began.  I never flattened her hat.  It was in the box, and so was I; but as for deliberate flattening——­It was just a thing that happened.  She should not write such interesting stories if she expects me to go on tiptoe through the world looking about for her hats.  To have that story taken away just at that particular moment was horrible.  There was fully as much as I had read still to come, so that a lot