The priest found the house he sought, despite the darkness of the street and the absence of any from whom to elicit information. The venta was on the ground-floor, and above it towered storey after storey, built with the quaint fantasy of the middle ages, and surmounted by a deep, overhanging gabled roof. The house seemed to have two staircases of stone and two doors—one on each side of the venta. There is a Spanish proverb which says that the rat which has only one hole is soon caught. Perhaps the architect remembered this, and had built his house to suit his tenants. It was on the fifth floor of this tenement that Father Concha, instructed by Heaven knows what priestly source of information, looked to meet with Sebastian, the whilom bodyservant of the late Colonel Monreal of Xeres. It was known among a certain section of the Royalists that this man had papers and perchance some information of value to dispose of, and more than one respectable, black-clad elbow had brushed the greasy walls of this staircase. Sebastian, it was said, passed his time in drinking and smoking. The boasted gaieties of Madrid had, it would appear, diminished to this sordid level of dissipation. The man was, indeed, thus occupied when the old priest opened the door of his room. ‘Yes,’ he answered in a thick voice, ‘I am Sebastian of Xeres, and no other; the man who knows more of the Carlist plots than any other in Madrid.’ ‘Can you read?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then you know nothing,’ said the Padre. ‘You have, however, a letter in a pink envelope which a friend of mine desires to possess. It is a letter of no importance, of no political value—a love letter, in fact.’ ‘Ah, yes! Ah, yes! That may be, reverendo. But there are others who want it—your love letter.’ ‘I offer you, on the part of my friend, a hundred pesetas for this letter.’ The priest’s wrinkled face wore a grim smile. It was so little—a hundred pesetas, the price of a dinner for two persons at one of the great restaurants on the Puerta del Sol. But to Father Concha the sum represented five hundred cups of black coffee denied to himself in the evening at the café—five hundred packets of cigarettes, so-called of Havana, unsmoked—two new cassocks in the course of twenty years—a hundred little gastronomic delights sternly resisted season after season. ‘Not enough, your hundred pesetas, reverendo, not enough,’ laughed the man. And Concha, who could drive as keen a bargain as any market-woman of Ronda, knew by the manner of saying it that Sebastian only spoke the truth when he said that he had other offers. ‘See, reverendo,’ the man went on, leaning across the table and banging a dirty fist upon it, ‘come to-night at ten o’clock. There are others coming at the same hour to buy my letter in the pink envelope. We will have an auction, a little auction, and the letter goes to the highest bidder. But what does your reverence want with a love letter, eh?’