d of peasant stock?" I exclaimed in the strangely conscious silence
that fell between Mills and Blunt.

"Oh! All these Basques have been ennobled by Don Sanche II," said
Captain Blunt moodily. "You see coats of arms carved over the doorways
of the most miserable _caserios_. As far as that goes she's Dona Rita
right enough whatever else she is or is not in herself or in the eyes of
others. In your eyes, for instance, Mills. Eh?"

For a time Mills preserved that conscious silence.

"Why think about it at all?" he murmured coldly at last. "A strange bird
is hatched sometimes in a nest in an unaccountable way and then the fate
of such a bird is bound to be ill-defined, uncertain, questionable. And
so that is how Henry Allegre saw her first? And what happened next?"

"What happened next?" repeated Mr. Blunt, with an affected surprise in
his tone. "Is it necessary to ask that question? If you had asked _how_
the next happened. . . But as you may imagine she hasn't told me
anything about that. She didn't," he continued with polite sarcasm,
"enlarge upon the facts. That confounded Allegre, with his impudent
assumption of princely airs, must have (I shouldn't wonder) made the fact
of his notice appear as a sort of favour dropped from Olympus. I really
can't tell how the minds and the imaginations of such aunts and uncles
are affected by such rare visitations. Mythology may give us a hint.
There is the story of Danae, for instance."

"There is," remarked Mills calmly, "but I don't remember any aunt or
uncle in that connection."

"And there are also certain stories of the discovery and acquisition of
some unique objects of art. The sly approaches, the astute negotiations,
the lying and the circumventing . . . for the love of beauty, you know."

With his dark face and with the perpetual smiles playing about his
grimness, Mr. Blunt appeared to me positively satanic. Mills' hand was
toying absently with an empty glass. Again they had forgotten my
existence altogether.

"I don't know how an object of art would feel," went on Blunt, in an
unexpectedly grating voice, which, however, recovered its tone
immediately. "I don't know. But I do know that Rita herself was not a
Danae, never, not at any time of her life. She didn't mind the holes in
her stockings. She wouldn't mind holes in her stockings now. . . That is
if she manages to keep any stockings at all," he added, with a sort of
suppressed fury so funnil