a large crop of recriminations, charges of incompetency and treachery, and a certain amount of scandalous gossip.  The banker (his wife’s salon had been very Carlist indeed) declared that he had never believed in the success of the cause.  “You are well out of it,” he remarked with a chilly smile to Monsieur George.  The latter merely observed that he had been very little “in it” as a matter of fact, and that he was quite indifferent to the whole affair.

“You left a few of your feathers in it, nevertheless,” the banker concluded with a wooden face and with the curtness of a man who knows.

Monsieur George ought to have taken the very next train out of the town but he yielded to the temptation to discover what had happened to the house in the street of the Consuls after he and Dona Rita had stolen out of it like two scared yet jubilant children.  All he discovered was a strange, fat woman, a sort of virago, who had, apparently, been put in as a caretaker by the man of affairs.  She made some difficulties to admit that she had been in charge for the last four months; ever since the person who was there before had eloped with some Spaniard who had been lying in the house ill with fever for more than six weeks.  No, she never saw the person.  Neither had she seen the Spaniard.  She had only heard the talk of the street.  Of course she didn’t know where these people had gone.  She manifested some impatience to get rid of Monsieur George and even attempted to push him towards the door.  It was, he says, a very funny experience.  He noticed the feeble flame of the gas-jet in the hall still waiting for extinction in the general collapse of the world.

Then he decided to have a bit of dinner at the Restaurant de la Gare where he felt pretty certain he would not meet any of his friends.  He could not have asked Madame Leonore for hospitality because Madame Leonore had gone away already.  His acquaintances were not the sort of people likely to happen casually into a restaurant of that kind and moreover he took the precaution to seat himself at a small table so as to face the wall.  Yet before long he felt a hand laid gently on his shoulder, and, looking up, saw one of his acquaintances, a member of the Royalist club, a young man of a very cheerful disposition but whose face looked down at him with a grave and anxious expression.

Monsieur George was far from delighted.  His surprise was extreme when in the course of the first phrases exchanged with him he learned that this acquaintance had come to the station with the hope of finding him there.

“You haven’t been seen for some time,” he said.  “You were perhaps somewhere where the news from the world couldn’t reach you?  There have been many changes amongst our friends and amongst people one used to hear of so much.  There is Madame de Lastaola for instance, who seems to have vanished from the world which was so much interested in her.  You have no idea where she may be now?”