The plaza was small and dark, though a thin crescent moon was just rising over the clustering roofs. Its faint light silvered the higher portions of the two square church towers that rose blackly against the velvety indigo with one great star between them, but the rest of the building, which was the one Nettie Harding had found shelter in, was blurred and shadowy. Beyond it a few lights blinked in the calle he had just passed through, but they only intensified the darkness of the narrow gap between the flat‐roofed houses, and—for it was getting late— the street seemed utterly silent. Yet Appleby had certainly heard footsteps, and no closing of a door to account for their cessation. The houses were large in that vicinity, and built, for the most part, round a patio, the outer door of which not infrequently consisted of a heavy iron grille which could scarcely be closed noiselessly. In front of him two streets branched off, one broad and well paved, the other narrow and very dark. The latter, however, led straight to the “Four Nations,” past the carniceria, or butchery, and two or three of the little wine‐shops of shady repute which are usually to be found close to the principal church in a Spanish town. Here and there a blink of light streamed out from the open lattice of one of them. Appleby stood still a moment, and then, reflecting that anybody who might be following him would expect him to take the broader way, slipped into the narrow street. A day or two earlier he would have laughed at the notion, but the footsteps which had stopped so abruptly troubled him. He had passed one wine‐shop when he heard them again, and, though it seemed at least possible that they were those of some citizen going home, there was an unpleasant suggestiveness in them, and when the light of the second wine‐shop fell across the street he decided to enter it. If the man behind him also stopped, his motive would be apparent. Two or three men sat in the wine‐shop with little glasses of caña before them, and Appleby was reassured when he glanced at them. They were evidently of the humbler orders, men who earned a meagre two or three pesetas a day; but their garments of cotton and coarse unstarched linen were, as usual, spotlessly clean, and he surmised from their shade of complexion that they had emigrated to Cuba from the Canaries. They saluted him courteously when he took off his hat on entering, and one laid down the torn and wine‐stained journal he was reading. “The war is making sugar dearer, señor,” he said. Appleby was not altogether pleased at being recognized, as the observation implied, but the man seemed civil, and he smiled. “It also puts up the cost of making it,” he said, turning to the landlord, as an excuse for remaining a little occurred to him. “You have Vermouth in an open bottle?”