Don Pedro shrugged his shoulders, and rolled a fresh _cigarito_. "There are two for nearly every grant of his late Excellency. Art thou certain, my brave friend, there are not _three_ to this of which thou speakest? If there be but one--Holy Mother! it is nothing. Surely the land has no value. Where is this modest property? How many leagues square? Come, we will retire in this room, and thou mayest talk undisturbed. There is excellent _aguardiente_ too, my Victor, come," and Don Pedro rose, conducted Victor into a smaller apartment, and closed the door. Nearly an hour elapsed. During that interval the sound of Victor's voice, raised in passionate recital, might have been heard by the occupants of the larger room but that they were completely involved in their own smoky atmosphere, and were perhaps politely oblivious of the stranger's business. They chatted, compared notes, and examined legal documents with the excited and pleased curiosity of men to whom business and the present importance of its results was a novelty. At a few minutes before nine Don Pedro reappeared with Victor. I grieve to say that either from the reaction of the intense excitement of the morning, from the active sympathy of his friend, or from the equally soothing anodyne of _aguardiente_, he was somewhat incoherent, interjectional, and effusive. The effect of excessive stimulation on passionate natures like Victor's is to render them either maudlin or affectionate. Mr. Ramirez was both. He demanded with tears in his eyes to be led to the ladies. He would seek in the company of Manuela, the stout female before introduced to the reader, that sympathy which an injured, deceived, and confiding nature like his own so deeply craved. On the staircase he ran against a stranger, precise, dignified, accurately clothed and fitted--the "Señor Perkins" just released from his slavery, a very different person from the one accidentally disclosed to him an hour before, on his probable way to the gaming table, and his habitual enjoyment on the evening of the day. In his maudlin condition, Victor would have fain exchanged views with him in regard to the general deceitfulness of the fair, and the misfortunes that attend a sincere passion, but Don Pedro hurried him below into the parlour, and out of the reach of the serenely contemptuous observation of the Señor Perkins's eye. Once in the parlour, and in the presence of the coquettish Manuela, who was still closely shawled, as if yet uncertain and doubtful in regard to the propriety of her garments above the waist, Victor, after a few vague remarks upon the general inability of the sex to understand a nature so profoundly deep and so wildly passionate as his own, eventually succumbed in a large black haircloth arm-chair, and became helplessly and hopelessly comatose.