as not driven into a convent one of my
best-loved friends?"

"My daughter refers to a sad story," explained her father. "In Madrid it
made a stir at the time. He jilted a school friend of Pilarcita's. That is
almost an unheard-of thing in Spain; but he did it. The young girl's
family got into trouble at Court--an insignificant affair; but the Duke is
ambitious of favour. He had something to retrieve, after the scandal
during the Spanish-American War, when he was quite a young man--not more
than twenty-four--and--"

"You mean, the story that he speculated in horses--bought wretched crocks
cheap and sold them to the army for the cavalry, with the connivance of
the vets he's supposed to have bribed?"

"Yes. He managed to clear himself; but the royalties looked at him coldly,
and he is not a man to bear that. The father of the girl--Pilarcita's
friend--was at one time much liked by the young King, and people thought it
was Carmona's motive for engaging himself. With the first breath of the
storm the Duke was off; and the discarded fiancee entered as a novice the
convent where she and my daughter went to school. That is why Pilarcita so
much dislikes him--"

"But it's not all!" cried the girl. "What about the grey bull, poor
Corcito."

Colonel O'Donnel laughed his gentle, chuckling laugh.

"Our home is close to a _ganaderia_--a bull-farm of the Duke's near
Seville," he explained indulgently. "The places adjoin; and as I've
allowed this Pilarcita to grow up a wild girl, very different from the
young ladies of Seville she should emulate, she has made friends of the
Duke's cattle. There were, some years ago, a grey bull that was as tame
with her as a pet dog; but it took a dislike to the Duke, who came to have
a look at his bulls once, and attacked him. The saying is that the Moorish
blood in the Carmonas gives them a cruel temper. At all events, Carmona
could not forgive the bull its disrespect, and promptly had it sent off to
the slaughter-house, though it was a _toro bravo_."

"That's like him," said I.

"There's nothing he wouldn't do against an enemy, or to gain a thing he
wanted," said Pilar, turning to me. "Take care, now he wants something you
want."

"It's been so between our families for generations," I said. "My
grandfather ran away with the girl his grandfather wanted to marry, and my
father and his in their youth had a furious lawsuit."

"Which won?" asked the girl.

"My father."

"Be sure he will r