He gravely walks on, and quite suddenly he comes upon a youthful Briton smoking a cigar and dangling a thick stick. "Ah!" the two men exclaim. "What are you doing in Barcelona?" asks the Spaniard. "The devil only knows, my dear man. I don't." "I hope he had nothing to do with your coming here--idle hands, you know." The Englishman sat gravely down on a small granite column and reflected. "No," he answered after a pause, "it was not that. I left England because I wanted to get away from--Well, from an old woman who wants me to marry her daughter. I went to Monte Carlo, and, if you don't mind my saying so, I'm hanged if she didn't follow me, bringing the poor girl with her." The Spaniard smiled gravely. "A willing victim!" "No, Lloseta, you're wrong there. That's the beastly part of it. That girl, sir, was actually shivering with fright one night when the old woman managed to leave us on the terrace together. Some one else, you know!" The dark eyes looking across towards Majorca were not pleasant to contemplate. "However," pursued the ingenuous parti, "I spoke to her as one might have done to another chap, you know. I said, 'You're frightened of something.' She didn't answer. 'You're afraid that I'm going to ask you to marry me.' 'Yes,' she answered. 'Well, I'm not. I'm not such a cad.' And after that we got on all right. She would have told who it was if I had let her. Two days later I sloped off here. Spain choked her off--the old lady, I mean." Lloseta laughed, and the young man began to think that he had said something rude. "She did not know what a nice place it is," he added, with a transparency which did no harm. "Yes, you're right. The devil had something to do with my coming here. Match-making old women are the devil." He paused and attended to his cigar. The steamer passed within a hundred yards of them. The Englishman nodded towards it. "Steamer's going to Majorca," he said. Lloseta nodded his head. "Yes," he answered gravely, "I know." "I came down to see it off!" The Spaniard looked at him sharply. "Why?" he asked. "I know an old chap on board--going across to fetch an English girl, a Miss Challoner. Her father's dead." Lloseta said nothing. Presently he turned to go, and as they walked back together he arranged to send a carriage for the Englishman and his luggage to bring him to the big house in the Street of the Peace, which he explained with a shadowy smile was more comfortable than the hotel. "So," he said to himself, as he walked towards his vast home alone, "so the Caballero Challoner is dead. They are passing off the stage one by one." CHAPTER V. THE VALLEY OF REPOSE. A home where exiled angels might forbear Awhile to moan for paradise.