ting in her anxious zeal and stopping at last with her
image of the Virgin she resembled flung wildly down her back from the
place where it had hung over her heart.

V

We preferred walking home from Senor Otero's house through the bright,
quiescing street, because in driving there we had met with an adventure
which we did not care to repeat. We were driving most unaggressively
across a small plaza, with a driver and a friend on the box beside him
to help keep us from harm, when a trolley-car came wildly round a corner
at the speed of at least two miles an hour and crossed our track. Our
own speed was such that we could not help striking the trolley in a
collision which was the fault of no one apparently. The front of the
car was severely banged, one mud-guard of our victoria was bent, and
our conversation was interrupted. Immediately a crowd assembled from the
earth or the air, but after a single exchange of reproaches between
the two drivers nothing was said by any one. No policeman arrived to
_constater_ the facts, and after the crowd had silently satisfied or
dissatisfied itself that no one was hurt it silently dispersed. The car
ambled grumbling off and we drove on with some vague murmurs from our
driver, whose nerves seemed shaken, but who was supported in a somewhat
lurching and devious progress by the caressing arm of the friend on the
seat beside him.

All this was in Seville, where the popular emotions are painted in
travel and romance as volcanic as at Naples, where no one would have
slept the night of our accident and the spectators would be debating it
still. In our own surprise and alarm we partook of the taciturnity of
the witnesses, which I think was rather fine and was much decenter than
any sort of utterance. On our way home we had occasion to practise a
like forbearance toward the lover whom we passed as he stood courting
through the casement of a ground floor. The soft air was full of the
sweet of jasmine and orange blossoms from the open _patios._ Many people
besides ourselves were passing, but in a well-bred avoidance of the dark
figure pressed to the grating and scarcely more recognizable than the
invisible figure within. I confess I thought it charming, and if at some
period of their lives people must make love I do not believe there is a
more inoffensive way of doing it.

By the sort of echo notable in life's experience we had a reverberation
of the orange-flower perfume of that night