y that time. Under the gateway of the extremely ugly tenement house,
which hides the Pavilion and the garden from the street, the wife of the
porter was waiting with her arms akimbo. At once she cried out to Rita:
'You were caught by our gentleman.'

"As a matter of fact, that old woman, being a friend of Rita's aunt,
allowed the girl to come into the garden whenever Allegre was away. But
Allegre's goings and comings were sudden and unannounced; and that
morning, Rita, crossing the narrow, thronged street, had slipped in
through the gateway in ignorance of Allegre's return and unseen by the
porter's wife.

"The child, she was but little more than that then, expressed her regret
of having perhaps got the kind porter's wife into trouble.

"The old woman said with a peculiar smile: 'Your face is not of the sort
that gets other people into trouble. My gentleman wasn't angry. He says
you may come in any morning you like.'

"Rita, without saying anything to this, crossed the street back again to
the warehouse full of oranges where she spent most of her waking hours.
Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed hours, she calls
them. She crossed the street with a hole in her stocking. She had a
hole in her stocking not because her uncle and aunt were poor (they had
around them never less than eight thousand oranges, mostly in cases) but
because she was then careless and untidy and totally unconscious of her
personal appearance. She told me herself that she was not even conscious
then of her personal existence. She was a mere adjunct in the twilight
life of her aunt, a Frenchwoman, and her uncle, the orange merchant, a
Basque peasant, to whom her other uncle, the great man of the family, the
priest of some parish in the hills near Tolosa, had sent her up at the
age of thirteen or thereabouts for safe keeping. She is of peasant
stock, you know. This is the true origin of the 'Girl in the Hat' and of
the 'Byzantine Empress' which excited my dear mother so much; of the
mysterious girl that the privileged personalities great in art, in
letters, in politics, or simply in the world, could see on the big sofa
during the gatherings in Allegre's exclusive Pavilion: the Dona Rita of
their respectful addresses, manifest and mysterious, like an object of
art from some unknown period; the Dona Rita of the initiated Paris. Dona
Rita and nothing more--unique and indefinable." He stopped with a
disagreeable smile.

"An