atly. The fellow is rather stupid and rather bad-tempered.
Queer creature, but very honest! Oh, very honest!"

CHAPTER IV

It was the last evening of Carnival. The same masks, the same yells, the
same mad rushes, the same bedlam of disguised humanity blowing about the
streets in the great gusts of mistral that seemed to make them dance like
dead leaves on an earth where all joy is watched by death.

It was exactly twelve months since that other carnival evening when I had
felt a little weary and a little lonely but at peace with all mankind.
It must have been--to a day or two. But on this evening it wasn't merely
loneliness that I felt. I felt bereaved with a sense of a complete and
universal loss in which there was perhaps more resentment than mourning;
as if the world had not been taken away from me by an august decree but
filched from my innocence by an underhand fate at the very moment when it
had disclosed to my passion its warm and generous beauty. This
consciousness of universal loss had this advantage that it induced
something resembling a state of philosophic indifference. I walked up to
the railway station caring as little for the cold blasts of wind as
though I had been going to the scaffold. The delay of the train did not
irritate me in the least. I had finally made up my mind to write a
letter to Dona Rita; and this "honest fellow" for whom I was waiting
would take it to her. He would have no difficulty in Tolosa in finding
Madame de Lastaola. The General Headquarters, which was also a Court,
would be buzzing with comments on her presence. Most likely that "honest
fellow" was already known to Dona Rita. For all I knew he might have
been her discovery just as I was. Probably I, too, was regarded as an
"honest fellow" enough; but stupid--since it was clear that my luck was
not inexhaustible. I hoped that while carrying my letter the man would
not let himself be caught by some Alphonsist guerilla who would, of
course, shoot him. But why should he? I, for instance, had escaped with
my life from a much more dangerous enterprise than merely passing through
the frontier line in charge of some trustworthy guide. I pictured the
fellow to myself trudging over the stony slopes and scrambling down wild
ravines with my letter to Dona Rita in his pocket. It would be such a
letter of farewell as no lover had ever written, no woman in the world
had ever read, since the beginning of love on earth.