The maid did not reply to the rebuke, uttered in a low tone, 'Oh, Motey, we've been waiting for you such a long time.' Instead, she turned to the Spaniard. 'My lady is tired, sir. Surely you've showed her enough by now.' He bent his head, silently opening again the glazed door and waiting for them to pass through, as his only answer. But Penelope's nerve had gone. She was clutching her old nurse's arm with desperate tightening fingers. 'I can't go through there, Motey, unless'--she spoke almost inaudibly--'unless you can make him walk through first.' Mrs. Mote was quite equal to the occasion. 'Will you please go on, sir? My mistress is nervous of the dark passage.' Again the Spaniard silently obeyed the old servant, and Penelope never saw the look, full of passionate humiliation and dumb craving for forgiveness, with which he uttered the words--though they brought vague relief--explaining that he was leaving his groom to drive her and her maid back to the hotel alone. During the moments which followed, Mrs. Robinson, looking straight before her, spoke much of indifferent matters, and pointed out to Mrs. Mote many an interesting and characteristic sight by the roadside; but both the speaker's knee and the hands clasped across it trembled violently the while, and when they were at last safely back again in the hotel, after Mrs. Robinson had said some gracious words to Don José Moricada's English groom, and had given him more substantial tokens of her gratitude for the many pleasant drives she had taken with his noble master, a curious thing happened. Having prepared the bath which had been her mistress's first order when they found themselves in their own rooms, Motey, now quite her stolid self again, on opening the sitting-room door, found her mistress engaged in a strange occupation. Mrs. Robinson, still standing, was cutting the long grey silk cloak, which she had been wearing but a moment before, into a thousand narrow strips. The maid's work-basket, a survival of Penelope's childhood--for it had been the little girl's first birthday-gift to her nurse--had evidently provided the sharp cutting-out scissors for the sacrifice. To a woman who has done much needlework there is something dreadful, unnatural, in the wanton destruction of a faithful garment, and Mrs. Mote stood looking on, silent indeed, but breathing protest in every line of her short figure. But Penelope, after a short glance, had at once averted her eyes, and completed her task with what seemed to the other a dreadful thoroughness. Then the relentless scissors attacked the charming hat. Each long white plume was quickly reduced to a heap of feathery atoms, and the exquisitely plaited straw was slashed through and through. 'You can give all the other things I have worn to-day to the chambermaid,' Mrs. Robinson said quickly, 'and Motey--never, never speak of--of--our stay here, in Madrid I mean, to me again. We shall leave to-night, not to-morrow morning.'