connected with the Carlist
organization the shortest way was to introduce myself as that "Monsieur
George" of whom he had probably heard.

He leaned far over the table, till his very breast-bone was over the
edge, as though his eyes had been stilettos and he wanted to drive them
home into my brain. It was only much later that I understood how near
death I had been at that moment. But the knives on the tablecloth were
the usual restaurant knives with rounded ends and about as deadly as
pieces of hoop-iron. Perhaps in the very gust of his fury he remembered
what a French restaurant knife is like and something sane within him made
him give up the sudden project of cutting my heart out where I sat. For
it could have been nothing but a sudden impulse. His settled purpose was
quite other. It was not my heart that he was after. His fingers indeed
were groping amongst the knife handles by the side of his plate but what
captivated my attention for a moment were his red lips which were formed
into an odd, sly, insinuating smile. Heard! To be sure he had heard!
The chief of the great arms smuggling organization!

"Oh!" I said, "that's giving me too much importance." The person
responsible and whom I looked upon as chief of all the business was, as
he might have heard, too, a certain noble and loyal lady.

"I am as noble as she is," he snapped peevishly, and I put him down at
once as a very offensive beast. "And as to being loyal, what is that?
It is being truthful! It is being faithful! I know all about her."

I managed to preserve an air of perfect unconcern. He wasn't a fellow to
whom one could talk of Dona Rita.

"You are a Basque," I said.

He admitted rather contemptuously that he was a Basque and even then the
truth did not dawn upon me. I suppose that with the hidden egoism of a
lover I was thinking of myself, of myself alone in relation to Dona Rita,
not of Dona Rita herself. He, too, obviously. He said: "I am an
educated man, but I know her people, all peasants. There is a sister, an
uncle, a priest, a peasant, too, and perfectly unenlightened. One can't
expect much from a priest (I am a free-thinker of course), but he is
really too bad, more like a brute beast. As to all her people, mostly
dead now, they never were of any account. There was a little land, but
they were always working on other people's farms, a barefooted gang, a
starved lot. I ought to know because we are distant relations.
T