you I would want you to feel that you have been there yourself. I
may overtax your patience with the story of my life so different
from yours, not only in all the facts but altogether in spirit.
You may not understand. You may even be shocked. I say all this
to myself; but I know I shall succumb! I have a distinct
recollection that in the old days, when you were about fifteen, you
always could make me do whatever you liked."

He succumbed. He begins his story for her with the minute
narration of this adventure which took about twelve months to
develop. In the form in which it is presented here it has been
pruned of all allusions to their common past, of all asides,
disquisitions, and explanations addressed directly to the friend of
his childhood. And even as it is the whole thing is of
considerable length. It seems that he had not only a memory but
that he also knew how to remember. But as to that opinions may
differ.

This, his first great adventure, as he calls it, begins in
Marseilles. It ends there, too. Yet it might have happened
anywhere. This does not mean that the people concerned could have
come together in pure space. The locality had a definite
importance. As to the time, it is easily fixed by the events at
about the middle years of the seventies, when Don Carlos de
Bourbon, encouraged by the general reaction of all Europe against
the excesses of communistic Republicanism, made his attempt for the
throne of Spain, arms in hand, amongst the hills and gorges of
Guipuzcoa. It is perhaps the last instance of a Pretender's
adventure for a Crown that History will have to record with the
usual grave moral disapproval tinged by a shamefaced regret for the