liquity of vision, this slight
tilt of the convex mirror that shaped the same world so differently to
onlookers at different points of its circle.

I could feel a little of it even then, when there was only the merest
chance of my going back to England and getting back towards our old
position on the rim of the mirror. The deviousness, the wayward passion,
even the sempiternal abuses of the land were already beginning to take
the aspect of something like quaint impotence. It was charm that, now I
was on the road away, was becoming apparent. The inconveniences of life,
the physical discomforts, the smells of streets, the heat, dropped into
the background. I felt that I did not want to go away, irrevocably from
a land sanctioned by her presence, her young life. I turned uneasily
to the other side. At the heavy black table, in the light of a single
candle, the Cuban and the Nova Scotian were discussing, their heads
close together.

"I tell you no," Nichols was saying in a fluent, abominable, literal
translation into Spanish. "Take the knife so... thumb upwards. Stab down
in the soft between the neck and the shoulder-blade. You get right into
the lungs with the point. I've tried it: ten times. Never stick the
back. The chances are he moves, and you hit a bone. There are no bones
there. It's the way they kill pigs in New Jersey."

The Cuban bent his brows as if he were reflecting over a chessboard.
"Ma...." he pondered. His knife was lying on the table. He unsheathed
it, then got up, and moved behind the seated Nova Scotian.

"You say... there?" he asked, pressing his little finger at the base of
Nichols' skinny column of a neck. "And then..." He measured the length
of the knife on Nichols's back twice with elaborate care, breathing
through his nostrils. Then he said with a convinced, musing air, "It is
true. It would go down into the lungs."

"And there are arteries and things," Nichols said.

"Yes, yes," the Cuban answered, sheathing the knife and thrusting it
into his belt.

"With a knife that length it's perfect." Nichols waved his shadowy hand
towards Salazar's scarf. Salazar moved off a little.

"I see the advantages," he said. "No crying out, because of the blood in
the lungs. I thank yous Senor Escoces."

Nichols rose, lurching to his full height, and looked in my direction. I
closed my eyes. I did not wish him to talk to me. I heard him say:

"Well, _hasta mas ver_. I shall get away from here. Good-night.