ndings
glanced up at it. And, therefore, he never saw a man sitting quietly
behind the curiously wrought railings, smoking a cigarette--a man who had
witnessed the whole incident from beginning to end. Who had, indeed, seen
more than the friar or the two quiet men-servants. For he had seen a
stick--probably a sword-stick, such as nearly every Spanish gentleman
carries in his own country--fly from the hand of Don Francisco de Mogente
at the moment when he was attacked, and fall into the gutter on the
darker side of the street, where it lay unheeded. Where, indeed, it still
remained when the friar with his swinging gait had turned the corner of
the Calle San Gregorio.

CHAPTER II

EVASIO MON
There are some people whose presence in a room seems to establish a
mental centre of gravity round which other minds hover uneasily,
conscious of the dead weight of that attraction.

"I have known Evasio all my life," the Count de Sarrion once said to his
son. "I have stood at the edge of that pit and looked in. I do not know
to this day whether there is gold at the bottom or mud. I have never
quarreled with him, and, therefore, we have never made it up."

Which, perhaps, was as good a description of Evasio Mon as any man had
given. He had never quarreled with any one. He was, in consequence, a
lonely man. For the majority of human beings are gregarious. They meet
together in order to quarrel. The majority of women prefer to sit and
squabble round one table to seeking another room. They call it the
domestic circle, and spend their time in straining at the family tie in
order to prove its strength.

It was Evasio Mon who, standing at the open window of his apartment in
the tall house next door to the Posada de los Reyes on the Paseo del
Ebro, had observed with the help of a field-glass, that a traveler was
crossing the river by the ferry-boat after midnight. He noted the unusual
proceeding with a tolerant shrug. It will be remembered that he closed
his glasses with a smile--not a smile of amusement or of contempt--not
even a deep smile such as people wear in books. It was merely a smile,
and could not be construed into anything else by any physiognomist. The
wrinkles that made it were deeply marked, which suggested that Evasio Mon
had learnt to smile when he was quite young. He had, perhaps, been
taught.

And, after all, a man may as well show a smile to the world as a worried
look, or a mean look, or one of the countless