has this--wonderful
celebrity--what does she call herself? How long has she been your
mistress?"

I reflected rapidly that if I knocked him over, chair and all, by a
sudden blow from the shoulder it would bring about infinite complications
beginning with a visit to the Commissaire de Police on night-duty, and
ending in God knows what scandal and disclosures of political kind;
because there was no telling what, or how much, this outrageous brute
might choose to say and how many people he might not involve in a most
undesirable publicity. He was smoking his cigar with a poignantly
mocking air and not even looking at me. One can't hit like that a man
who isn't even looking at one; and then, just as I was looking at him
swinging his leg with a caustic smile and stony eyes, I felt sorry for
the creature. It was only his body that was there in that chair. It was
manifest to me that his soul was absent in some hell of its own. At that
moment I attained the knowledge of who it was I had before me. This was
the man of whom both Dona Rita and Rose were so much afraid. It remained
then for me to look after him for the night and then arrange with Baron
H. that he should be sent away the very next day--and anywhere but to
Tolosa. Yes, evidently, I mustn't lose sight of him. I proposed in the
calmest tone that we should go on where he could get his much-needed
rest. He rose with alacrity, picked up his little hand-bag, and, walking
out before me, no doubt looked a very ordinary person to all eyes but
mine. It was then past eleven, not much, because we had not been in that
restaurant quite an hour, but the routine of the town's night-life being
upset during the Carnival the usual row of fiacres outside the Maison
Doree was not there; in fact, there were very few carriages about.
Perhaps the coachmen had assumed Pierrot costumes and were rushing about
the streets on foot yelling with the rest of the population. "We will
have to walk," I said after a while.--"Oh, yes, let us walk," assented
Senor Ortega, "or I will be frozen here." It was like a plaint of
unutterable wretchedness. I had a fancy that all his natural heat had
abandoned his limbs and gone to his brain. It was otherwise with me; my
head was cool but I didn't find the night really so very cold. We
stepped out briskly side by side. My lucid thinking was, as it were,
enveloped by the wide shouting of the consecrated Carnival gaiety. I
have heard many noises