the parcel away.  I could have thrown it at his head; but I thought suddenly of that hard, prayerful life, knowing nothing of any ease or pleasure in the world, absolutely nothing but a pinch of snuff now and then.  I remembered how wretched he used to be when he lacked a copper or two to get some snuff with.  My face was hot with indignation, but before I could fly out at him I remembered how simple he was.  So I said with great dignity that as the present came from the King and as he wouldn’t receive it from my hand there was nothing else for me to do but to throw it into the brook; and I made as if I were going to do it, too.  He shouted:  ’Stay, unhappy girl!  Is it really from His Majesty, whom God preserve?’ I said contemptuously, ‘Of course.’  He looked at me with great pity in his eyes, sighed deeply, and took the little tin from my hand.  I suppose he imagined me in my abandoned way wheedling the necessary cash out of the King for the purchase of that snuff.  You can’t imagine how simple he is.  Nothing was easier than to deceive him; but don’t imagine I deceived him from the vainglory of a mere sinner.  I lied to the dear man, simply because I couldn’t bear the idea of him being deprived of the only gratification his big, ascetic, gaunt body ever knew on earth.  As I mounted my mule to go away he murmured coldly:  ‘God guard you, Senora!’ Senora!  What sternness!  We were off a little way already when his heart softened and he shouted after me in a terrible voice:  ’The road to Heaven is repentance!’ And then, after a silence, again the great shout ‘Repentance!’ thundered after me.  Was that sternness or simplicity, I wonder?  Or a mere unmeaning superstition, a mechanical thing?  If there lives anybody completely honest in this world, surely it must be my uncle.  And yet—­who knows?

“Would you guess what was the next thing I did?  Directly I got over the frontier I wrote from Bayonne asking the old man to send me out my sister here.  I said it was for the service of the King.  You see, I had thought suddenly of that house of mine in which you once spent the night talking with Mr. Mills and Don Juan Blunt.  I thought it would do extremely well for Carlist officers coming this way on leave or on a mission.  In hotels they might have been molested, but I knew that I could get protection for my house.  Just a word from the ministry in Paris to the Prefect.  But I wanted a woman to manage it for me.  And where was I to find a trustworthy woman?  How was I to know one when I saw her?  I don’t know how to talk to women.  Of course my Rose would have done for me that or anything else; but what could I have done myself without her?  She has looked after me from the first.  It was Henry Allegre who got her for me eight years ago.  I don’t know whether he meant it for a kindness but she’s the only human being on whom I can lean.  She knows . . .  What doesn’t she know about me!  She has never failed to do the right thing for me unasked.  I couldn’t part with her.  And I couldn’t think of anybody else but my sister.