accepted their relationship without in the least understanding how
Carlos, with his fine grain, his high soul--I gave him credit for a
high soul--could put up with the squalid ferocity with which I credited
Castro. It seemed to hang in the air round the grotesque ragged-ness of
the saturnine brown man.

Carlos had made Spain too hot to hold him in those tortuous intrigues of
the Army of the Faith and Bourbon troops and Italian legions. From what
I could understand, he must have played fast and loose in an insolent
manner. And there was some woman offended. There was a gayness and
gallantry in that part of it. He had known the very spirit of romance,
and now he was sailing gallantly out to take up his inheritance from
an uncle who was a great noble, owning the greater part of one of the
Intendencias of Cuba.

"He is a very old man, I hear," Carlos said--"a little doting, and
having need of me."

There were all the elements of romance about Carlos' story--except the
actual discomforts of the ship in which we were sailing. He himself had
never been in Cuba or seen his uncle; but he had, as I have indicated,
ruined himself in one way or another in Spain, and it had come as a
God-send to him when his uncle had sent Tomas Castro to bring him to
Cuba, to the town of Rio Medio.

"The town belongs to my uncle. He is very rich; a Grand d'Espagne . . .
everything; but he is now very old, and has left Havana to die in his
palace in his own town. He has an only daughter, a Dona Seraphina, and I
suppose that if I find favour in his eyes I shall marry her, and inherit
my uncle's great riches; I am the only one that is left of the family to