ds of music and laughter from the
invalid's room startled him wide awake. The sick man's watchers were
coquetting with some one who stood in the little court-yard five stories
below. A certain breadth of repartee was naturally allowable at that
distance; the lover avowed his passion in ardent terms, and the ladies
mocked him with the same freedom, now and then totally neglecting him
while they sang a snatch of song to the twanging of the guitar,
or talked professional gossip, and then returning to him with some
tormenting expression of tenderness.

All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to Basil; yet he could
recollect few things intended for his pleasure that had given him more
satisfaction. He thought, as he glanced out into the moonlight on the
high-gabled silvery roofs around and on the gardens of the convents
and the towers of the quaint city, that the scene wanted nothing of the
proper charm of Spanish humor and romance, and he was as grateful to
those poor souls as if they had meant him a favor. To us of the hither
side of the foot-lights, there is always something fascinating in the
life of the strange beings who dwell beyond them, and who are never so
unreal as in their own characters. In their shabby bestowal in those
mean upper rooms, their tawdry poverty, their merry submission to the
errors and caprices of destiny, their mutual kindliness and careless
friendship, these unprofitable devotees of the twinkling-footed
burlesque seemed to be playing rather than living the life of strolling
players; and their love-making was the last touch of a comedy that Basil
could hardly accept as reality, it was so much more like something seen
upon the stage. He would not have detracted anything from the commonness
and cheapness of the 'mise en scene', for that, he reflected drowsily
and confusedly, helped to give it an air of fact and make it like an
episode of fiction. But above all, he was pleased with the natural
eventlessness of the whole adventure, which was in perfect agreement
with his taste; and just as his reveries began to lose shape in dreams,
he was aware of an absurd pride in the fact that all this could have
happened to him in our commonplace time and hemisphere. "Why," he
thought, "if I were a student in Alcala, what better could I have
asked?" And as at last his soul swung out from its moorings and lapsed
down the broad slowly circling tides out in the sea of sleep, he was
conscious of one subtle touch