Shrinking behind the side of the doorway, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said, with a dignity that recalled their scattered senses, “but will you ’ave the goodness to look if my beads are on your table—­O thanks, thanks, thanks!” she continued, showing her face and one hand, as Basil blushingly advanced with a string of heavy black beads, piously adorned with a large cross.  “I’m sure, I’m greatly obliged to you, gentlemen, and I hask a thousand pardons for troublin’ you,” she concluded in a somewhat severe tone, that left them abashed and culpable; and vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared.

“Now, see here,” said the Colonel, with a huge sigh as he closed the door again, and this time locked it, “I should like to know how long this sort of thing is to be kept up?  Because, if it’s to be regularly repeated during the night, I’m going to dress again.”  Nevertheless, he finished undressing and got into bed, where he remained for some time silent.  Basil put out the light.  “O, I’m sorry you did that, my dear fellow,” said the Colonel; “but never mind, it was an idle curiosity, no doubt.  It’s my belief that in the landlord’s extremity of bedlinen, I’ve been put to sleep between a pair of tablecloths; and I thought I’d like to look.  It seems to me that I make out a checkered pattern on top and a flowered or arabesque pattern underneath.  I wish they had given me mates.  It ’s pretty hard having to sleep between odd tablecloths.  I shall complain to the landlord of this in the morning.  I’ve never had to sleep between odd table-cloths at any hotel before.”

The Colonel’s voice seemed scarcely to have died away upon Basil’s drowsy ear, when suddenly the sounds of music and laughter from the invalid’s room startled him wide awake.  The sick man’s watchers were coquetting with some one who stood in the little court-yard five stories below.  A certain breadth of repartee was naturally allowable at that distance; the lover avowed his passion in ardent terms, and the ladies mocked him with the same freedom, now and then totally neglecting him while they sang a snatch of song to the twanging of the guitar, or talked professional gossip, and then returning to him with some tormenting expression of tenderness.

All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to Basil; yet he could recollect few things intended for his pleasure that had given him more satisfaction.  He thought, as he glanced out into the moonlight on the high-gabled silvery roofs around and on the gardens of the convents and the towers of the quaint city, that the scene wanted nothing of the proper charm of Spanish humor and romance, and he was as grateful to those poor souls as if they had meant him a favor.  To us of the hither side of the foot-lights, there is always something fascinating in the life of the strange beings who dwell beyond them, and who are never so unreal as in their own characters.  In their shabby bestowal in those mean upper rooms, their tawdry