But as Captain Mitchell was turning away, without as much as a nod or a glance, he hastened to say-- “You may go and wait downstairs for the senor doctor, whom I am going to liberate, too. You foreigners are insignificant, to my mind.” He forced a slight, discordant laugh out of himself, while Captain Mitchell, for the first time, looked at him with some interest. “The law shall take note later on of your transgressions,” Sotillo hurried on. “But as for me, you can live free, unguarded, unobserved. Do you hear, Senor Mitchell? You may depart to your affairs. You are beneath my notice. My attention is claimed by matters of the very highest importance.” Captain Mitchell was very nearly provoked to an answer. It displeased him to be liberated insultingly; but want of sleep, prolonged anxieties, a profound disappointment with the fatal ending of the silver-saving business weighed upon his spirits. It was as much as he could do to conceal his uneasiness, not about himself perhaps, but about things in general. It occurred to him distinctly that something underhand was going on. As he went out he ignored the doctor pointedly. “A brute!” said Sotillo, as the door shut. Dr. Monygham slipped off the window-sill, and, thrusting his hands into the pockets of the long, grey dust coat he was wearing, made a few steps into the room. Sotillo got up, too, and, putting himself in the way, examined him from head to foot. “So your countrymen do not confide in you very much, senor doctor. They do not love you, eh? Why is that, I wonder?” The doctor, lifting his head, answered by a long, lifeless stare and the words, “Perhaps because I have lived too long in Costaguana.” Sotillo had a gleam of white teeth under the black moustache. “Aha! But you love yourself,” he said, encouragingly. “If you leave them alone,” the doctor said, looking with the same lifeless stare at Sotillo’s handsome face, “they will betray themselves very soon. Meantime, I may try to make Don Carlos speak?” “Ah! senor doctor,” said Sotillo, wagging his head, “you are a man of quick intelligence. We were made to understand each other.” He turned away. He could bear no longer that expressionless and motionless stare, which seemed to have a sort of impenetrable emptiness like the black depth of an abyss.