Duke's party--with one exception.

By the time the plan was mapped out, it was nearly seven o'clock, but the
O'Donnels still urged me to dine at the Cortijo de Santa Rufina. The
Gloria would eat up the six miles distance in ten minutes; I could bathe
and dress before 8.15, when dinner would be ready (a telegram had been
sent to the servants from Cordoba), and rested and refreshed, I could
start for Seville in the car again at half-past nine.

So we flashed out across the Guadalquivir, by way of the bridge of Isabel
Segunda, into that strange suburb which gave Trajan birth, and my family
their name; ancient Trajana, now Triana, town of potters, picadores, and
gypsies.

Dark-browed boys played _toreros_ to our car as bull, their coats
_muletas_, sticks their _banderillas_, yelling and springing lithely aside
as the enemy rushed on them. Girls, handsome as Carmen, flung us flowers,
staring boldly eye to eye; and this was my welcome to the place near which
the Casa Trianas had once lived and thought themselves great!

Almost could I have seen the towers of the old house--now the property of
the King--as we passed into open country again; but I did not speak, nor
did the others, though the thought in my mind must have been in Pilar's
and Colonel O'Donnel's.

Five miles more, through falling dusk and sweet country scents and we
turned off the main road into another, gleaming white as a path of snow in
the opal twilight. Then, in a wide-reaching plantation of olives, spraying
silver on a ruddy soil where glimmered irrigation tanks and grinding
mills, we came upon a large, irregular clump of white buildings grouped
together, and made one by a high wall with an open belfry at one corner.

"Here we are at home!" exclaimed the Cherub with a contented sigh, as he
gently touched Ropes' shoulder. "Welcome, dear friends, to the Cortijo de
Santa Rufina. It, and all within its walls, is at your disposition."

We drove in through a wide gate in the outer wall, where there was a
clamour of greeting from the steward, many servants, and more dogs, dogs
of all races, who selected Pilar for their wildest demonstrations. In a
second she was out of the car, and half drowned in a wave of tumultuous
doghood. Laughing, shaking hands with the servants, patting or suppressing
greyhounds, collies, setters, retrievers, she had never seemed so
charming. This was the _real_ Pilar--Pilar at home; the Pilar it would be
next to impossible to uproot