automobile and took him away for an hour. Presently he was told the
story of this morning visitor by several people in the house, and he had
listened to it as one didn't often listen to twice-told tales, for it
was amazing to observe how each of the tellers, whether it was tipsy Fra
Jeronimo or the triple-chinned landlady, Donna Gloria, or Pepe, the
Atheist medical student who kept his skeletons in the washhouse on the
roof, accepted it as a quite commonplace episode. The man in the
automobile had lost his wife. He minded quite a lot, perhaps because he
had gone through a good deal to get her. When he first met her she was
another man's wife. He said nothing to her then, but presently the way
that he stared at her at the bullfight and the opera and waited in the
Paseo de la Delicias for her carriage to come by made Seville talk, and
her husband called him out. The duel was fought on some sandy flat down
by the river, and the husband was killed. It was given out that he had
been gored by a bull, and within a year the widow married the man who
had killed him. In another year she was dead of fever. Her husband gave
great sums for Masses for her soul and to charity, and shut up the house
where they had entertained Seville with the infantile, interminable
gaieties that are loved by the South, and went abroad. When he returned
he went back to live in that house, but now no one ever entered it
except the priest; and he went not for any social purpose, but to say
Mass over the woman's bed, which her husband had turned into an altar.
Every day those two said Mass at that bed, though it was five years
since she had died. That was a queer enough story for the present day,
with its woman won by bloodshed and the long unassuagable grief of the
lover and the resort to religion that struck us as irreverent because it
was so utterly believing; it might have come out of the Decameron. But
the last touch of wildness was added by the identity of the man in the
automobile. For he was the Marquis d'Italica, the finest Spanish
aviator, a man not only of the mediæval courage one might have guessed