t impression."

"You are saying she ees shock?" said Enriquez, gravely.

I felt I could not conscientiously say that she was shocked, and he saw
my hesitation. "Then she have jealousy of the senoritas," he observed,
with insufferable complacency. "You observe! I have already said. It is
ever so."

I could stand it no longer. "Look here, Harry," I said, "if you must
know it, she looks upon you as an acrobat--a paid performer."

"Ah!"--his black eyes sparkled--"the torero, the man who fights the
bull, he is also an acrobat."

"Yes; but she thinks you a clown!--a GRACIOSO DE TEATRO--there!"

"Then I have make her laugh?" he said coolly.

I don't think he had; but I shrugged my shoulders.

"BUENO!" he said cheerfully. "Lofe, he begin with a laugh, he make
feenish with a sigh."

I turned to look at him in the moonlight. His face presented its
habitual Spanish gravity--a gravity that was almost ironical. His
small black eyes had their characteristic irresponsible audacity--the
irresponsibility of the vivacious young animal. It could not be
possible that he was really touched with the placid frigidities of
Miss Mannersley. I remembered his equally elastic gallantries with Miss
Pinkey Smith, a blonde Western belle, from which both had harmlessly
rebounded. As we walked on slowly I continued more persuasively: "Of
course this is only your nonsense; but don't you see, Miss Mannersley
thinks it all in earnest and really your nature?" I hesitated, for
it suddenly struck me that it WAS really his nature. "And--hang it
all!--you don't want her to believe you a common buffoon., or some
intoxicated muchacho."

"Intoxicated?" repeated Enriquez, with exasperating languishment. "Yes;
that is the word that shall express itself. My friend, you have made
a shot in the center--you have ring the bell every time! It is
intoxication--but not of aguardiente. Look! I have long time an ancestor
of whom is a pretty story. One day in church he have seen a young
girl--a mere peasant girl--pass to the confessional. He look her in
her eye, he stagger"--here Enriquez wobbled pantomimically into the
road--"he fall!"--he would have suited the action to the word if I had
not firmly held him up. "They have taken him home, where he have remain
without his clothes, and have dance and sing. But it was the drunkenness
of lofe. And, look you, thees village girl was a nothing, not even
pretty. The name of my ancestor was--"

"Don Quixote de La Mancha