he wore them with an air and a grace. He had probably been in worse
circumstances when campaigning with the Army of the Faith in Spain.
And there was certainly the uncle with the romantic title and the great
inheritance, and the cousin--the Miss Seraphina, whom he would probably
marry. I imagined him an aristocratic scapegrace, a corsair--it was the
Byronic period then--sailing out to marry a sort of shimmering princess
with hair like Veronica's, bright golden, and a face like that of a
certain keeper's daughter. Carlos, however, knew nothing about his
cousin; he cared little more, as far as I could tell. "What can she
be to me since I have seen your...?" he said once, and then stopped,
looking at me with a certain tender irony. He insisted, though, that his
aged uncle was in need of him. As for Castro--he and his rags came out
of a life of sturt and strife, and I hoped he might die by treachery.
He had undoubtedly been sent by the uncle across the seas to find
Carlos and bring him out of Europe; there was-something romantic in
that mission. He was now a dependent of the Riego family, but there were
unfathomable depths in that tubby little man's past. That he had gone to
Russia at the tail of the Grande Armée, one could not help believing. He
had been most likely in the grand army of sutlers and camp-followers.
He could talk convincingly of the cold, and of the snows and his escape.
And from his allusions one could get glimpses of what he had been
before and afterwards--apparently everything that was questionable in a
secularly disturbed Europe; no doubt somewhat of a bandit; a guerrillero
in the sixes and sevens; with the Army of the Faith near the French
border, later on.

There had been room and to spare for that sort of pike, in the muddy
waters, during the first years of the century. But the waters were
clearing, and now the good Castro had been dodging the gallows in the
Antilles or in Mexico. In his heroic moods he would swear that his