gone I found myself down there unhurt, but dazed,
bewildered, not sufficiently stunned. It so happened that that creature
was somewhere in the neighbourhood. How he found out. . . But it's his
business to find out things. And he knows, too, how to worm his way in
anywhere. Indeed, in the first days he was useful and somehow he made it
look as if Heaven itself had sent him. In my distress I thought I could
never sufficiently repay. . . Well, I have been paying ever since."

"What do you mean?" asked Mills softly. "In hard cash?"

"Oh, it's really so little," she said. "I told you it wasn't the worst
case. I stayed on in that house from which I nearly ran away in my
nightgown. I stayed on because I didn't know what to do next. He
vanished as he had come on the track of something else, I suppose. You
know he really has got to get his living some way or other. But don't
think I was deserted. On the contrary. People were coming and going,
all sorts of people that Henry Allegre used to know--or had refused to
know. I had a sensation of plotting and intriguing around me, all the
time. I was feeling morally bruised, sore all over, when, one day, Don
Rafael de Villarel sent in his card. A grandee. I didn't know him, but,
as you are aware, there was hardly a personality of mark or position that
hasn't been talked about in the Pavilion before me. Of him I had only
heard that he was a very austere and pious person, always at Mass, and
that sort of thing. I saw a frail little man with a long, yellow face
and sunken fanatical eyes, an Inquisitor, an unfrocked monk. One missed
a rosary from his thin fingers. He gazed at me terribly and I couldn't
imagine what he might want. I waited for him to pull out a crucifix and
sentence me to the stake there and then. But no; he dropped his eyes and
in a cold, righteous sort of voice informed me that he had called on
behalf of the prince--he called him His Majesty. I was amazed by the
change. I wondered now why he didn't slip his hands into the sleeves of
his coat, you know, as begging Friars do when they come for a
subscription. He explained that the Prince asked for permission to call
and offer me his condolences in person. We had seen a lot of him our
last two months in Paris that year. Henry Allegre had taken a fancy to
paint his portrait. He used to ride with us nearly every morning.
Almost without thinking I said I should be pleased. Don Rafael was
shocked a