"For God's sake, sir, not another word!" replied Militona very quickly, without turning her head and scarcely moving her lips. The words were spoken in a tone at once so imperative and so imploring, that Andres immediately saw it was not the artifice of a young girl begging to be let alone, and hoping to be disobeyed. Neither could modesty dictate the injunction. Nothing he had said called for such rigour, and manolas, the grisettes of Madrid, are not usually--be it said without calumny--of such extreme susceptibility. Real terror, apprehension of a danger unknown to Andres, was indicated by the hasty sentence. "Can she be a princess in disguise?" said Andres to himself, considerably puzzled how to act. "If I hold my tongue, I shall look like a fool, or, at any rate, like a very middling sort of Don Juan: if I persist, I shall perhaps cause the poor girl some disagreeable scene. Can she be afraid of the duenna? Hardly. When that amiable old sorceress devoured my comfits, she became in some sort an accomplice. It cannot be she whom my infanta dreads. Is there a father, brother, husband, or jealous lover in the neighbourhood?" But on looking around, Andres could discover no one who seemed to pay the slightest attention to the proceedings of the beautiful manola. From the moment of the bull's death till the end of the fight, Juancho did not once look at Militona. He despatched with unparalleled dexterity two other bulls that fell to his share, and was applauded as vehemently as he had previously been hissed. Andres, either not deeming it prudent, or not finding a good pretext to renew the conversation, didn't speak another word to Militona, and even left the circus a few minutes before the conclusion of the performances. Whilst stepping across the benches, he whispered something to a boy of quick and intelligent physiognomy, and then immediately disappeared. The boy, when the audience rose to depart, mingled in the crowd, and, without any apparent design, attached himself to the steps of Militona and the duenna. He saw them get into their cabriolet, and when the vehicle rolled away on its great scarlet wheels, he hung on behind, as if giving way to a childish impulse, and was whirled through a cloud of dust, singing at the top of his voice the popular ditty of the Bulls of Puerto. "Well done!" exclaimed Andres, who, from an alley of the Prado, which he had already reached, saw cab and boy rattle past: "in an hour I shall know the address of the charming manola."