the
money."

"There will be three of them now," thought the unlucky Schomberg.

But Pedro, at any rate, was just a simple, straightforward brute, if
a murderous one. There was no mystery about him, nothing uncanny, no
suggestion of a stealthy, deliberate wildcat turned into a man, or of an
insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and bones and
a subtle power of terror. Pedro with his fangs, his tangled beard, and
queer stare of his little bear's eyes was, by comparison, delightfully
natural. Besides, Schomberg could no longer help himself.

"That will do very well," he asserted mournfully. "But if you gentlemen,
if you had turned up here only three months ago--ay, less than three
months ago--you would have found somebody very different from what I am
now to talk to you. It's true. What do you think of that?"

"I scarcely know what to think. I should think it was a lie. You were
probably as tame three months ago as you are now. You were born tame,
like most people in the world."

Mr Jones got up spectrally, and Ricardo imitated him with a snarl and a
stretch. Schomberg, in a brown study, went on, as if to himself:

"There has been an orchestra here--eighteen women."

Mr Jones let out an exclamation of dismay, and looked about as if the
walls around him and the whole house had been infected with plague. Then
he became very angry, and swore violently at Schomberg for daring to
bring up such subjects. The hotel-keeper was too much surprised to get
up. He gazed from his chair at Mr. Jones's anger, which had nothing
spectral in it but was not the more comprehensible for that.

"What's the matter?" he stammered out. "What subject? Didn't you hear me
say it was an orchestra? There's nothing wrong in that. Well, there was
a girl amongst them--" Schomberg's eyes went stony; he clasped his hands
in front of his breast with such force that his knuckles came out white.
"Such a girl! Tame, am I? I would have kicked everything to pieces about
me for her. And she, of course . . . I am in the prime of life . . .
then a fellow bewitched her--a vagabond, a false, lying, swindling,
underhand, stick-at-nothing brute. Ah!"

His entwined fingers cracked as he tore his hands apart, flung out his
arms, and leaned his forehead on them in a passion of fury. The other
two looked at his shaking back--the attenuated Mr. Jones with mingled
scorn and a sort of fear, Ricardo with the expression of a cat which
sees a piece of fi