I settled the party for the night in a small hotel and procured their tickets for the morrow's journey, after which they proceeded to hand over to Giannoli, with many cautions and precautions, a mysterious linen bag which, it was whispered, contained some twelve thousand lire in bank-notes (about five hundred pounds sterling). Then, having been assured by Giannoli that I was to be trusted, they told me their story. The two brothers, the engineers, had till quite recently been employed by a large electrical engineering firm in Barcelona, of which an elder brother, some years their senior, was the manager. For some time the two younger men had been engaged, unknown to their family, in Anarchist propaganda, and had fallen in with the section of the _individualisti_. Fernandez was in love with Adolfa, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant, and had secretly talked her over to his own ideas. The girl's parents objected to the match on account of the extreme youth of the couple--the girl was not quite eighteen and the young man still considerably under age. Therefore they settled to elope, and Fernandez's brother and Vanni, their journalist friend, expressed a desire to form an addition to the elopement. This Fernandez had at first objected to, but the girl, who had made rapid strides into the Giannolian free-love theories, insisted. Lack of money formed the only obstacle to this scheme, but an unforeseen circumstance enabled them to remove it. The eldest brother, who had charge of the finances of the establishment, and whose business it was to pay the men their wages, wished to absent himself from the works for a few days, and, without the knowledge of his employers, he broke rules to the extent of handing over to his brother Fernandez, as to one beyond suspicion, the men's wages--the five hundred pounds now contained in the mysterious linen bag. "Now," argued Fernandez to himself, "I, as an Anarchist, do not recognise private property, nor any set moral laws. The company's money is the result of plunder; they can afford to lose it and have no right to it; I stand desperately in need of it--and it is in my hands.... My brother?... oh, my brother, he is after all nothing but a bourgeois, and I, as an Anarchist, admit of no family ties." Thus when, two days later, the unfortunate manager returned, he found his brothers gone, the money nowhere to be found, and disgrace and ruin ahead. Driven to despair, and not knowing in what direction to turn for the necessary sum, the wretched man ended his perplexities with a bullet. This was the first news which greeted the runaways on their arrival in the States.