At Madrid he had engaged a suite of rooms at the Ritz Hotel in the Plaza de Canovas, near the Prado Museum. Democrat and anarchist as he was in theory, the man delighted in displaying a certain amount of ostentation, whether at home or abroad. A little aware of his weakness in this direction, he consoled himself by the thought that in doing this he was throwing dust in the eyes of people of his own class--that he could more successfully carry on his propaganda, because nobody would ever suspect him of seeking to overthrow the regime under which he had prospered so exceedingly. The young Frenchwoman, Valerie Delmonte, was in Madrid at the same time also as Contraras. She was staying at an equally luxurious hostelry-- the Grand Hotel de la Paix in the Puerta del Sol. She also had a suite of rooms, imitating her illustrious chief. She chose to be known by her maiden name of Mademoiselle Valerie Delmonte. It did not suit her emancipated notions that a woman should sink her identity in that of a husband. She had borne with the infliction for three short years of married life. When her elderly husband, a rich Paris financier, died she found herself a very wealthy woman. Monsieur Varenne had no near kith or kin. With the exception of a few handsome legacies, he had left all his money to this young woman who was very handsome and still young, only in the late twenties. Contraras was an anarchist by profound and philosophical conviction. He had persuaded himself that revolution, open and brutal revolution, was the only cure for a rotten and diseased world. Valerie had arrived at the same conclusion from a merely personal standpoint--from the point of view of her own feelings. Naturally of a morbid temperament, absolutely a child of the gutter, the offspring of drunken and dissolute parents who had starved and beaten her, she had suffered no illusions as to what existence meant for the impoverished. She was a sharp-witted child, with plenty of brain-power, and a marvellous capacity for self-education. At the age of twelve her parents had sold her for a paltry sum to the proprietor of a travelling circus. This man had perceived at once that there was plenty of grit in the precocious child. He had got her very cheap. If he trained her carefully he might make a good deal of money out of her. The precocious little Valerie left her parents without the slightest regret--her life had been one long torture with them. The circus-proprietor was a big, burly man, not destitute of a rough geniality. There was a hard look in his eyes, a dogged squareness of the jaw that suggested a latent brutality.