“Beautiful,” he said, “beautiful!  Read it again, master.”

Adrian did so with much delight, remembering the tale of how the music of Orpheus had charmed the very beasts.

“Ah!” said Martin, “that’s a love-letter, isn’t it, to that splendid, black-eyed marchioness, whom I saw looking at you?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Adrian, highly pleased, although to tell the truth he could not recollect upon what occasion the fair Isabella had favoured him with her kind glances.  “Yet I suppose that you might call it so, an idealised love-letter, a letter in which ardent and distant yet tender admiration is wrapt with the veil of verse.”

“Quite so.  Well, Master Adrian, just you send it to her.”

“You don’t think that she might be offended?” queried Adrian doubtfully.

“Offended!” said Martin, “if she is I know nothing of women” (as a matter of fact he didn’t.) “No, she will be very pleased; she’ll take it away and read it by herself, and sleep with it under her pillow until she knows it by heart, and then I daresay she will ask you to come and see her.  Well, I must be off, but thank you for reading me the beautiful poetry letter, Heer Adrian.”

“Really,” reflected Adrian, as the door closed behind him, “this is another instance of the deceitfulness of appearances.  I always thought Martin a great, brutal fool, yet in his breast, uncultured as it is, the sacred spark still smoulders.”  And then and there he made up his mind that he would read Martin a further selection of poems upon the first opportunity.

If only Adrian could have been a witness to the scene which at that very moment was in progress at the works!  Martin having delivered the key of the box, sought out Foy, and proceeded to tell him the story.  More, perfidious one, he handed over a rough draft of the sonnet which he had surreptitiously garnered from the floor, to Foy, who, clad in a leather apron, and seated on the edge of a casting, read it eagerly.

“I told him to send it,” went on Martin, “and, by St. Peter, I think he will, and then if he doesn’t have old Don Diaz after him with a pistol in one hand and a stiletto in the other, my name isn’t Martin Roos.”

“Of course, of course,” gasped Foy, kicking his legs into the air with delight, “why, they call the old fellow ‘Singe jaloux.’  Oh! it’s capital, and I only hope that he opens the lady’s letters.”

Thus did Foy, the commonplace and practical, make a mock of the poetic efforts of the high-souled and sentimental Adrian.

Meanwhile Adrian, feeling that he required air after his literary labours, fetched his peregrine from its perch—­for he was fond of hawking—­and, setting it on his wrist, started out to find a quarry on the marshes near the town.

Before he was halfway down the street he had forgotten all about the sonnet and the lovely Isabella.  His was a curious temperament, and this sentimentality, born of vainness and idle hours, by no means expressed it all.  That he was what we should nowadays call a prig we know, and also that he possessed his father’s, Montalvo’s, readiness of speech without his father’s sense of humour.  In him, as Martin had hinted, the strain of the sire predominated, for in all essentials Adrian was as Spanish in mind as in appearance.