"Are you afraid of the consul's dog?" I asked jocularly. The
consul's dog weighed about a pound and a half and was known to the
whole town as exhibited on the consular fore-arm in all places, at
all hours, but mainly at the hour of the fashionable promenade on
the Prado.

But I felt my jest misplaced when Mills growled low in my ear:
"They are all Yankees there."

I murmured a confused "Of course."

Books are nothing. I discovered that I had never been aware before
that the Civil War in America was not printed matter but a fact
only about ten years old. Of course. He was a South Carolinian
gentleman. I was a little ashamed of my want of tact. Meantime,
looking like the conventional conception of a fashionable reveller,
with his opera-hat pushed off his forehead, Captain Blunt was
having some slight difficulty with his latch-key; for the house
before which we had stopped was not one of those many-storied
houses that made up the greater part of the street. It had only
one row of windows above the ground floor. Dead walls abutting on
to it indicated that it had a garden. Its dark front presented no
marked architectural character, and in the flickering light of a
street lamp it looked a little as though it had gone down in the
world. The greater then was my surprise to enter a hall paved in
black and white marble and in its dimness appearing of palatial
proportions. Mr. Blunt did not turn up the small solitary gas-jet,
but led the way across the black and white pavement past the end of
the staircase, past a door of gleaming dark wood with a heavy