“I obeyed, senores, almost without thinking, so great was my astonishment.  It was greater still when I heard what she had to say.  She began by thanking me for my forbearance of her father’s infirmity, so that I felt ashamed of myself.  I had meant to show disdain, not forbearance!  Every word must have burnt her lips, but she never departed from a gentle and melancholy dignity which filled me with respect against my will.  Senores, we are no match for women.  But I could hardly believe my ears when she began her tale.  Providence, she concluded, seemed to have preserved the life of that wronged soldier, who now trusted to my honour as a caballero and to my compassion for his sufferings.

“‘Wronged man,’ I observed, coldly.  ’Well, I think so, too:  and you have been harbouring an enemy of your cause.’

“’He was a poor Christian crying for help at our door in the name of God, senor,’ she answered, simply.

“I began to admire her.  ‘Where is he now?’ I asked, stiffly.

“But she would not answer that question.  With extreme cunning, and an almost fiendish delicacy, she managed to remind me of my failure in saving the lives of the prisoners in the guardroom, without wounding my pride.  She knew, of course, the whole story.  Gaspar Ruiz, she said, entreated me to procure for him a safe-conduct from General San Martin himself.  He had an important communication to make to the commander-in-chief.

“Por Dios, senores, she made me swallow all that, pretending to be only the mouthpiece of that poor man.  Overcome by injustice, he expected to find, she said, as much generosity in me as had been shown to him by the Royalist family which had given him a refuge.

“Ha!  It was well and nobly said to a youngster like me.  I thought her great.  Alas! she was only implacable.

“In the end I rode away very enthusiastic about the business, without demanding even to see Gaspar Ruiz, who I was confident was in the house.

“But on calm reflection I began to see some difficulties which I had not confidence enough in myself to encounter.  It was not easy to approach a commander-in-chief with such a story.  I feared failure.  At last I thought it better to lay the matter before my general-of-division, Robles, a friend of my family, who had appointed me his aide-de-camp lately.

“He took it out of my hands at once without any ceremony.

“‘In the house! of course he is in the house,’ he said contemptuously.  ’You ought to have gone sword in hand inside and demanded his surrender, instead of chatting with a Royalist girl in the porch.  Those people should have been hunted out of that long ago.  Who knows how many spies they have harboured right in the very midst of our camps?  A safe-conduct from the Commander-in-Chief!  The audacity of the fellow!  Ha! ha!  Now we shall catch him to-night, and then we shall find out, without any safe-conduct, what he has got to say, that is so very important.  Ha! ha! ha!’