Catalina did not share his embarrassment. With her hat pulled low that she might attract the less attention, she was eating her dinner with the serenity of a child. As he seemed indisposed to conversation she did not utter a word until the salad was placed beside them, and then she met his disturbed and roving eye. “You look fearfully tired,” she said, smiling. “While you are drinking your coffee I will go and talk to that man behind the counter and see what can be done about to-night. You look as if you ought to be in bed this minute.” “Ah!” He was taken aback, and still helpless. “I must ask you not to talk to any one unless I am with you. They would never understand it. We had better cut the dessert and the coffee and secure what rooms there may be. I suppose most of these people are going on, but a few may remain.” They went together to pay their score, and Catalina asked the functionary behind the counter if there were rooms above for travellers. He replied, with the haughty indifference of the American hotel clerk, that there were not. She demanded further information, and he merely shrugged his shoulders, for it is the way of the Spaniard to know no man’s business but his own. But Catalina stood her ground, told him she would stand it till dawn, or follow him home; and finally, overcome by her fluency in invective, he unwillingly parted with the information that behind the station across the road there was a small inn above a _cantina_. “I am half-way sorry we did not leave a message for Mr. Moulton and go on,” said Over, as they stood in the inky darkness and watched the train pull out of the station. “Probably, however, he would never have got it—well, there is nothing to do but make the best of it.” They crossed the sandy road, guided by the glimmer of the _cantina_. Here they found the host serving two men that would have put the Guardia Civile on the alert. He greeted the strangers politely, however, and called his wife. She came in a moment, smiling and comely, followed by a red-haired girl holding a candle. Catalina, warned by her recent interview, uttered a few of the flowery amenities that should lead up to any request in Spain. The woman, beaming with good-will, took the candle from her daughter’s hand, motioned to the girl to take the portmanteaus, and, without apology for her humble lodgings, piloted them out into the dark, through another doorway, and up a rickety stair. Over, feeling as if he were being led out to be shot by the enemy, saw his worst fears verified. She threw open the door of a tiny, blue-washed room, and there were the two little beds, the more conspicuous as they were uncompanioned but for a tin washing-stand. It opened upon a balcony, and, despite the bareness, it was so clean and inviting it seemed to make a personal appeal not to be judged too hastily. Over was unable to articulate, but Catalina said, serenely, “We wish two rooms, señora.”