"Well, they'll soon be shut of me, and the sooner the better. As for that other poor woman, she knows how to stand by a fellow when he's knocked out of time. She--she--well, never mind about her----" "Is she going to help you out of a tight place?" "She would. She'd raise half for six months and the whole for three, at five per cent." "Does she think you would accept?" "Do you?" he returned fiercely, giving de Konski's searching look steadily back. "Am I a cur?" The bearded face softened in a smile that was almost tender. "Poor chap!" he said, laying a hand on his shoulder, and looking with unseeing eyes across the gorge and away over the sea to the faint mountain chain rising dim and dreamlike on the horizon. "_I_ was in a tight place once," said the Anarchist presently. "I had been playing the fool rather more than most young asses do. So I went straight to my chief and made a clean breast of it----" "You were a soldier? I always thought so." "And he put me on honour never to touch a card again--and helped and--saved me." "Mine breaks a chap," the boy said wearily. "Chauffeurs get good pay, they say. I might be that, mightn't I?" "What you have to do now is to raise this money, cut the whole thing, before it comes to your chief's ears, and go straight. He won't stand this kind of thing. I've heard him say it's incurable. But nothing is--except cruelty, perhaps. Yes; this money must be raised at once." "But how?" the boy asked, looking up with wondering eyes and a gleam of incredulous hope. De Konski was silent, smoking steadily with long, even puffs, and staring with close-drawn brows at the sea, over which the black hulls of battle-ships were now ranged in lines and squadrons half-hidden by the smoke of their guns, beginning to boom in the opening thunders of sham fight. "But how?" the lad repeated, impatiently scanning the thoughtful face, that seemed to seek solution of the problem from those smoke-hidden monsters upon the velvety blue. The firing was too fierce and incessant for any speech to be audible for some seconds; then it suddenly stopped, and de Konski turned and was about to reply, when his attention was arrested by the sound of a high treble voice coming round the bend of the rock-strewn bank on which they were sitting, screened from the sight of those approaching from Turbia. Many had come thence and passed in the last half-hour on their way to see the review off Villafranca.