He smiled with a good deal of fine malice, and looked as if he expected me to be pleased. I said that I did not quite understand what had offended his uncle. “Oh, it was because there was no priest,” Carlos answered, “when those poor devils were hung. They were _canaille_. Yes; but one gives that much even to such. And my uncle was there in his official capacity as a a plenipotentiary. He was very much distressed: we were all. You heard, my uncle himself had advised their being surrendered to your English. And when there was no priest he repented very bitterly. Why, after all, it was an infamy.” He paused again, and leant back against the counter. When his eyes were upon the ground and his face not animated by talking, there became lamentably insistent his pallor, the deep shadows under his eyes, and infinite sadness in the droop of his features, as if he were preoccupied by an all-pervading and hopeless grief. When he looked at me, he smiled, however. “Well, at worst it is over, and my uncle is here in this dirty place instead of at your palace. We sail back to Cuba this very evening.” He looked round him at Ramon’s calicos and sugar tubs in the dim light, as if he accepted almost incredulously the fact that they could be in such a place, and the manner of his voice indicated that he thought our governor’s palace would have been hardly less barbarous. “But I am sorry,” he said suddenly, “because I wanted you--you and all your countrymen--to make a good impression on him. You must do it yourself alone. And you will. You are not like these others. You are our kinsman, and I have praised you very much. You saved my life.” I began to say that I had done nothing at all, but he waved his hand with a little smile. “You are very brave,” he said, as if to silence me. “I am not ungrateful.” He began again to ask for news from home--from my home. I told him that Veronica had a baby, and he sighed. “She married the excellent Rooksby?” he asked. “Ah, what a waste.” He relapsed into silence again. “There was no woman in your land like her. She might have------- And to marry that--that excellent personage, my good cousin. It is a tragedy.” “It was a very good match,” I answered. He sighed again. “My uncle is asleep in there, now,” he said, after a pause, pointing at the inner door. “We must not wake him; he is a very old man. You do not mind talking to me? You will wait to see them? Dona Seraphina is here, too.” “You have not married your cousin?” I asked. I wanted very much to see the young girl who had looked at me for a moment, and I certainly should have been distressed if Carlos had said she was married. He answered, “What would you have?” and shrugged his shoulders gently. A smile came into his face. “She is very willful. I did not please her, I do not know why. Perhaps she has seen too many men like me.”