consequence, I had already about me the elements of some worldly
sense.

Rearranging my collar, which, truth to say, ought to have been a
round one above a short jacket, but was not, I observed
felicitously that I had come to say good-bye, being ready to go off
to sea that very night with the Tremolino. Our hostess, slightly
panting yet, and just a shade dishevelled, turned tartly upon J. M.
K. B., desiring to know when HE would be ready to go off by the
Tremolino, or in any other way, in order to join the royal
headquarters. Did he intend, she asked ironically, to wait for the
very eve of the entry into Madrid? Thus by a judicious exercise of
tact and asperity we re-established the atmospheric equilibrium of
the room long before I left them a little before midnight, now
tenderly reconciled, to walk down to the harbour and hail the
Tremolino by the usual soft whistle from the edge of the quay. It
was our signal, invariably heard by the ever-watchful Dominic, the
padrone.

He would raise a lantern silently to light my steps along the
narrow, springy plank of our primitive gangway. "And so we are
going off," he would murmur directly my foot touched the deck. I
was the harbinger of sudden departures, but there was nothing in
the world sudden enough to take Dominic unawares. His thick black
moustaches, curled every morning with hot tongs by the barber at
the corner of the quay, seemed to hide a perpetual smile. But
nobody, I believe, had ever seen the true shape of his lips. From
the slow, imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man you would
think he had never smiled in his life. In his eyes lurked a look
of perfectly remorseless irony, as though he had been provided with