“‘Leaving Madrid with regret,’ ran the diary, ‘but have the benefit of agreeable society on the road. Hope to cover thirty miles to the day. I have a broad sash to keep off the colic, and an amulet from a fair friend to keep off the _evil eye_.’ “Thus equipped, the dragoon rode to Cadiz, and I must do him the justice to say that he looked on the country he rode through with an appreciative eye, noting the scent of the orange-blossom which assailed him as he entered Andalusia, and the grandeur of the rocky passes which connect northern and southern Spain. At the same time, he kept that nice sense of proportion by which tolerable food and lodging remains more important to the traveller than beauty of scenery. He noted also the superior attractions of the Andalusian women, ‘little, and dark, and for the most part fat, but with twinkling eyes and a smile more _friendly_, if also more _covert_, than their sisters of Madrid.’ “I turned over the pages again at this point, and chanced at last upon a phrase which convinced me that he had met his love. Then the book fell from my hand, and I lost myself in a reverie, working my way laboriously through a maze of preconception to the fact that this dancer of whom I had heard from Ruth was not an English dancer, but a Spanish dancer, and as this fact broke like daylight upon me I realised that I had bored into the heart of my mystery. Moments of revelation are intrinsically dramatic things, when a new knowledge, irrevocable, undisputable, comes to dwell in the mind. All previous habitants have to readjust themselves to make room for the stranger. A great shuffling and stampeding took place now in my brain, but I found that, far from experiencing discomfort or difficulty in accommodating themselves to their new conditions, my prejudices jumped briskly round and presented themselves in their true shape beneath the searching glare of the revelation. “I read on eagerly, the shadow of disappointment lifting from me. Oliver Pennistan lodged at an inn which provided him with excellent Valdepeñas; his business in Cadiz was somehow connected with wine, and many technical jottings followed, put in as a guide to his memory; I did not understand all his abbreviations, but was nevertheless impressed by his knowledge of sherry. His business took him most of the day. In the evenings he was a free man, and spent his time in the theatre; probably it was here that he first saw his dancer, for at about this time her name began to appear in the diary: ‘To the fight with Concha,’ or ‘With Concha to the merry-go-round.’ There were also references to the ‘Egyptians,’ who were Concha’s people, and the Goya world of Madrid was replaced by a society of Bohemians—bull fighters, mountebanks, acrobats, hunchbacks, thieves, fortune tellers, all the riff-raff of the gipsy quarter.