t or the cigarette box would fly
up, dropping a shower of cigarettes on the floor. We would pick them up,
re-establish everything, and fall into a long silence, so close that the
sound of the first word would come with all the pain of a separation.

It was at that time, too, that she suggested I should take up my quarters
in her house in the street of the Consuls. There were certain advantages
in that move. In my present abode my sudden absences might have been in
the long run subject to comment. On the other hand, the house in the
street of Consuls was a known out-post of Legitimacy. But then it was
covered by the occult influence of her who was referred to in
confidential talks, secret communications, and discreet whispers of
Royalist salons as: "Madame de Lastaola."

That was the name which the heiress of Henry Allegre had decided to adopt
when, according to her own expression, she had found herself precipitated
at a moment's notice into the crowd of mankind. It is strange how the
death of Henry Allegre, which certainly the poor man had not planned,
acquired in my view the character of a heartless desertion. It gave one
a glimpse of amazing egoism in a sentiment to which one could hardly give
a name, a mysterious appropriation of one human being by another as if in
defiance of unexpressed things and for an unheard-of satisfaction of an
inconceivable pride. If he had hated her he could not have flung that
enormous fortune more brutally at her head. And his unrepentant death
seemed to lift for a moment the curtain on something lofty and sinister
like an Olympian's caprice.

Dona Rita said to me once with humorous resignation: "You know, it
appears that one must have a name. That's what Henry Allegre's man of
business told me. He was quite impatient with me about it. But my name,
_amigo_, Henry Allegre had taken from me like all the rest of what I had
been once. All that is buried with him in his grave. It wouldn't have
been true. That is how I felt about it. So I took that one." She
whispered to herself: "Lastaola," not as if to test the sound but as if
in a dream.

To this day I am not quite certain whether it was the name of any human
habitation, a lonely _caserio_ with a half-effaced carving of a coat of
arms over its door, or of some hamlet at the dead end of a ravine with a
stony slope at the back. It might have been a hill for all I know or
perhaps a stream. A wood, or perhaps a combination