“I have seen that dim yard myself,” said Malory, “chaotic with lashings and tramplings, and pawings and snortings, and the vast animals butt against the woodwork, and their huge forms move confusedly in the limited space. Like Pennistan, I would not care to chance my skin. Concha, who being a Spaniard was bred up to violence, was even a little frightened, ‘clung to me,’ said the diary, ‘and besought me not to leave her. We saw the bulls in their cells from above, by the light of torches. These brands may be thrust down to burn and singe and further enrage the beast,’ but Oliver Pennistan, who had been nurtured on this mild farm among pampered and kindly kine, did not like the sport, so turned away with Concha on his arm and passed through a door into the upper gallery of the arena. “The vast circle seemed yet vaster by reason of its emptiness. Its ten thousand seats curved round in tiers and tiers and tiers, a gigantic funnel, open to the sky in which sailed a full and placid moon. The arena, ready raked and scattered with whitish sand, gleamed palely below, as if it had been the reflection of the heavenly moon in a pool of water. The great place lay in haunted silence. “It was here, sitting in a box, that they came to their final agreement. The diary naturally giving me no hint of the words that passed between them, I had to be content with a laconic entry some few days later: ‘Married this morning at the church of S. Pedro.’ I sat on in my room wondering what Oliver Pennistan had made of that surrendered, inviolate soul, the no doubt rather stupid and affected soldier, the scion of English yeomen; I wonder what he made of his wildling, sprung as she was from God knows what parentage; the Moorish Empire and the Holy Land had both surely gone to her making. They roamed Spain together for their honeymoon, and I accompanied them in spirit, seeing her dance, not in public places only, but in their room, for his eyes alone, his hungry love her sweetest applause; dancing in her little shift, and teaching his clumsy hands to clap and his lips to cry ‘Olé!’ I wonder too what the mountebanks of the trade thought of Concha’s husband, who sat through her performance in the hot, boarded theatres of Spanish provincial towns, and would allow no other man near his wife, and who, when one evening she for pure mischief eluded him, only grieved in silence and thought her love was going from him. I wonder most of all what Concha thought of him, his staid insularity, his perpetual talk of home, and his unassailable prejudices?