whose prominent eyes flash with excitement. That is Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam. The last or the supposed last of the great family. He is
telling that girl a story--that fair girl with heavy eyelids, stupid and
sensual. She is, however, genuinely astonished and interested, and he is
striving to play upon her ignorance. Listen to him. "Spain--the night is
fragrant with the sea and the perfume of the orange trees, you know--a
midnight of stars and dreams. Now and then the silence is broken by the
sentries challenging--that is all. But not in Spanish but in French are
the challenges given; the town is in the hands of the French; it is
under martial law. But now an officer passes down a certain garden, a
Spaniard disguised as a French officer; from the balcony the family--one
of the most noble and oldest families Spain can boast of, a thousand
years, long before the conquest of the Moors--watches him. Well
then"--Villiers sweeps with a white feminine hand the long hair that is
falling over his face--he has half forgotten, he is a little mixed in
the opening of the story, and he is striving in English to "scamp," in
French to _escamoter_. "The family are watching, death if he is caught,
if he fails to kill the French sentry. The cry of a bird, some vague
sound attracts the sentry, he turns; all is lost. The Spaniard is
seized. Martial law, Spanish conspiracy must be put down. The French
general is a man of iron." (Villiers laughs, a short, hesitating laugh
that is characteristic of him, and continues in his abrupt, uncertain
way), "man of iron; not only he declares that the spy must be beheaded,
but also the entire family--a man of iron that, ha, ha; and then, no you
cannot, it is impossible for you to understand the enormity of the
calamity--a thousand years before the conquest by the Moors, a Spaniard
alone could--there is no one here, ha, ha, I was forgetting--the utter
extinction of a great family of the name, the oldest and noblest of all
the families in Spain, it is not easy to understand that, no, not easy
here in the 'Nouvelle Athènes'--ha, ha, one must belong to a great