"Well, now you are getting foolish!" exclaimed the lady, with a nervous smile. "Well-to-do people do not leave their children dressed in rags."
Certainly the baby was dressed in miserable clothes and covered with a scanty, dirty cloak.
"Gently, Amalia, gently," interposed Saleta in his clear, quiet voice. "Many years ago I found in the doorway of my house in Madrid a child enveloped in very old clothes, and at the end of some time we ascertained that he was the son of a very important personage, who shall be nameless."
All eyes were now turned to the Galician magistrate in surprise.
"It was a very important personage, it was——" he continued, after a pause, with the same cool impertinence: "well, it was very easy to guess who it was; the features of the face showed him to be a perfect Bourbon."
The audience was quite taken aback. They looked at each other with the slightly amused smile prevalent on such occasions, and Saleta was quite unconcerned.
"Hurry up!" exclaimed Valero; "won't you have your umbrella?"
"The child died when he was two months old," continued the imperturbable Saleta; "and it was a fact that when we went to the cemetery, a carriage joined the funeral cortège, and nobody knew to whom it belonged. But I knew it, for I had seen it in the royal stables; however, I held my tongue."
"Will the babbler never cease?" murmured Valero.
"All right, Saleta; you must tell us this story by day, at night such things are rather boring," said the Chatterbox intervening and winking at the others. "What we have to think of now, Amalia, is what is to be done with the baby."