"Mademoiselle," he replied, with a gesture of sorrow, "unhappily, I am
not the Duc de Soria."

I felt all the despair with which he uttered the word "unhappily." Ah!
my dear, never should I have conceived it possible to throw so much
meaning and passion into a single word. His eyes had dropped, and he
dared no longer look at me.

"M. de Talleyrand," I said, "in whose house you spent your years of
exile, declares that any one bearing the name of Henarez must either
be the late Duc de Soria or a lacquey."

He looked at me with eyes like two black burning coals, at once
blazing and ashamed. The man might have been in the torture-chamber.
All he said was:

"My father was in truth the servant of the King of Spain."

Griffith could make nothing of this sort of lesson. An awkward silence
followed each question and answer.

"In one word," I said, "are you a nobleman or not?"

"You know that in Spain even beggars are noble."

This reticence provoked me. Since the last lesson I had given play to
my imagination in a little practical joke. I had drawn an ideal
portrait of the man whom I should wish for my lover in a letter which
I designed giving to him to translate. So far, I had only put Spanish
into French, not French into Spanish; I pointed this out to him, and