There were no passengers for the three little towns, and Over and Catalina went in one of the diligences to Baeza, twelve miles distant. They spent a happy and irresponsible day roaming about the dilapidated sixteenth-century town, and divided their tortilla out in the country in the great shadow of the Sierra Nevada. They retained their spirits over the rough and dusty miles of their return, but lost them suddenly as they approached the station. The train, however, was three hours late this evening, and they philosophically dismissed the Moultons and enjoyed their dinner. They lingered over the sweets and coffee, then paced up and down the platform, the Englishman smoking and feeling like a truant schoolboy. Nevertheless, he was not sorry that the end of the intimacy approached. The results of propinquity might ofttimes be casual, but that mighty force was invariably loaded with the seeds of fate, and he knew himself as liable to love as any man. With the oddest and most enigmatic girl he had ever met, who allured while striving to repel, as devoid of coquetry as a boy or a child, yet now and then revealing a glimpse of watchful femininity, to whom nature had given a wellnigh perfect shell; and thrown upon his protection in long days of companionship—he summed it up curtly over his pipe. “I should make an ass of myself in a week.” He had had no desire to marry since the days of his more susceptible youth—he was now thirty-four—and, although rich girls had made no stronger appeal to him than poor girls, he was well aware that the dowerless beauty was not for him. He was too good a soldier and too much of a man to be luxurious in taste or habit, and, although a guardsman, he was born into the out-of-door generation that has nothing in common with the scented lap-dogs made famous by the novelists of the mid-Victorian era. But when not at the front he indulged himself in liberty, many hours at cricket and golf, the companionship of congenial spirits, a reasonable amount of dining out, and an absolute freedom from the petty details of life. Travelling third class amused him, the English aristocrat being the truest democrat in the world and wholly without snobbery. Single, his debts worried him no more than bad weather in London; but married, he must at once set up an establishment suited to his position.