I did better.  I returned to my window as though I had seen nothing and heard nothing of the letter, then I said aloud: 

“Come and look at the stars, Griffith.”

Griffith was sleeping as only old maids can.  But the Moor, hearing me, slid down, and vanished with ghostly rapidity.

He must have been dying of fright, and so was I, for I did not hear him go away; apparently he remained at the foot of the elm.  After a good quarter of an hour, during which I lost myself in contemplation of the heavens, and battled with the waves of curiosity, I closed my widow and sat down on the bed to unfold the delicate bit of paper, with the tender touch of a worker amongst the ancient manuscripts at Naples.  It felt redhot to my fingers.  “What a horrible power this man has over me!” I said to myself.

All at once I held out the paper to the candle—­I would burn it without reading a word.  Then a thought stayed me, “What can he have to say that he writes so secretly?” Well, dear, I did burn it, reflecting that, though any other girl in the world would have devoured the letter, it was not fitting that I—­Armande-Louise-Marie de Chaulieu—­should read it.

The next day, at the Italian opera, he was at his post.  But I feel sure that, ex-prime minister of a constitutional government though he is, he could not discover the slightest agitation of mind in any movement of mine.  I might have seen nothing and received nothing the evening before.  This was most satisfactory to me, but he looked very sad.  Poor man! in Spain it is so natural for love to come in at the window!

During the interval, it seems, he came and walked in the passages.  This I learned from the chief secretary of the Spanish embassy, who also told the story of a noble action of his.

As Duc de Soria he was to marry one of the richest heiresses in Spain, the young princess Marie Heredia, whose wealth would have mitigated the bitterness of exile.  But it seems that Marie, disappointing the wishes of the fathers, who had betrothed them in their earliest childhood, loved the younger son of the house of Soria, to whom my Felipe, gave her up.  Allowing himself to be despoiled by the King of Spain.

“He would perform this piece of heroism quite simply,” I said to the young man.

“You know him then?” was his ingenuous reply.

My mother smiled.

“What will become of him, for he is condemned to death?” I asked.

“Though dead to Spain, he can live in Sardinia.”

“Ah! then Spain is the country of tombs as well as castles?” I said, trying to carry it off as a joke.

“There is everything in Spain, even Spaniards of the old school,” my mother replied.

“The Baron de Macumer obtained a passport, not without difficulty, from the King of Sardinia,” the young diplomatist went on.  “He has now become a Sardinian subject, and he possesses a magnificent estate in the island with full feudal rights.  He has a palace at Sassari.  If Ferdinand VII. were to die, Macumer would probably go in for diplomacy, and the Court of Turin would make him ambassador.  Though young, he is—­”