It was at that time, too, that she suggested I should take up my quarters in her house in the street of the Consuls. There were certain advantages in that move. In my present abode my sudden absences might have been in the long run subject to comment. On the other hand, the house in the street of Consuls was a known out-post of Legitimacy. But then it was covered by the occult influence of her who was referred to in confidential talks, secret communications, and discreet whispers of Royalist salons as: “Madame de Lastaola.” That was the name which the heiress of Henry Allègre had decided to adopt when, according to her own expression, she had found herself precipitated at a moment’s notice into the crowd of mankind. It is strange how the death of Henry Allègre, which certainly the poor man had not planned, acquired in my view the character of a heartless desertion. It gave one a glimpse of amazing egoism in a sentiment to which one could hardly give a name, a mysterious appropriation of one human being by another as if in defiance of unexpressed things and for an unheard-of satisfaction of an inconceivable pride. If he had hated her he could not have flung that enormous fortune more brutally at her head. And his unrepentant death seemed to lift for a moment the curtain on something lofty and sinister like an Olympian’s caprice. Doña Rita said to me once with humorous resignation: “You know, it appears that one must have a name. That’s what Henry Allègre’s man of business told me. He was quite impatient with me about it. But my name, _amigo_, Henry Allègre had taken from me like all the rest of what I had been once. All that is buried with him in his grave. It wouldn’t have been true. That is how I felt about it. So I took that one.” She whispered to herself: “Lastaola,” not as if to test the sound but as if in a dream. To this day I am not quite certain whether it was the name of any human habitation, a lonely _caserio_ with a half-effaced carving of a coat of arms over its door, or of some hamlet at the dead end of a ravine with a stony slope at the back. It might have been a hill for all I know or perhaps a stream. A wood, or perhaps a combination of all these: just a bit of the earth’s surface. Once I asked her where exactly it was situated and she answered, waving her hand cavalierly at the dead wall of the room: “Oh, over there.” I thought that this was all that I was going to hear but she added moodily, “I used to take my goats there, a dozen or so of them, for the day. From after my uncle had said his Mass till the ringing of the evening bell.” I saw suddenly the lonely spot, sketched for me some time ago by a few words from Mr. Blunt, populated by the agile, bearded beasts with cynical heads, and a little misty figure dark in the sunlight with a halo of dishevelled rust-coloured hair about its head.