They were in the passage behind the boxes, and Mrs. Rothe, who was pallid with disgust and delighted to express herself to a sympathetic woman—her young husband had sulkily torn himself from the ring—walked out with Catalina anathematizing the Spanish race. As they emerged, Mr. Moulton, green and very silent, disappeared. When he returned he was still pale, but normal once more, and after a speech of five minutes’ duration, in which, ignoring the finer flowers of his working vocabulary, he consigned Spain to eternal perdition—Catalina had driven off with Mrs. Rothe—he was quite restored, and celebrated his recovery by a long pull at a wine-skin. “I believe I am quite demoralized,” he said, cheerfully; and then, in company with Over and young Rothe—whose wife had amiably bade him stay—he returned to the ring. XVII “I saw that horse standing in the middle of the arena every time my mind was off guard!” said Catalina. “I woke up suddenly in the night with the hideous vision painted on the dark. I thought it was a judgment on me for going—that I should be haunted by it for the rest of my life. I believe it was Velasquez that banished it, but now I see it only at intervals.” “Perhaps,” said Over, “we were wiser in going back. Our savagery was glutted and the imagination blunted. I was never so bored in my life as at the end of two hours of it, and I haven’t thought of it since.” They were down in the crypt of the Escorial, in the Pantheon de los Reyes. Mrs. Rothe had offered to chaperon Catalina, and after two days of sight-seeing in Toledo had returned to Madrid to prepare for the trip south. She had seen the Escorial, and Catalina had come out alone with Over to the grim mass of masonry growing out of the Guadarrama Mountains, which from a distance looks like a phantom casino for dead pleasures. They had wandered over it leisurely, lingering in the cell, with its scant leather furniture, where Philip II. in his monastic arrogance had received the ambassadors of Europe, and peering through the little window of the inner cell upon the same sight that had held his dying gaze as he lay where they, as a great concession, were permitted to stand—a high-mass in the chapel beyond. Then they had descended the fifty-nine steps into the black-and-gold vault where lies the dust of Charles V. and his successors to the throne of Spain, together with the queens who reigned, or mothered kings.