"Then the whole thing is very simple. You must let me join your choir, gentlemen."
"Yes, yes, that is simple enough," put in Luisa impatiently: "the more so, as our chorus is popular not only in the taverns, but at the French officers' messes. But these spies of ours are slow and dull to a degree: I think sometimes it takes a quite special clumsiness to be a clerk of the arsenal or to swindle the country in the military stores. We can get you into communication with them, Don Eugenio: but how are they to pass their information to you? They are born bunglers, and the French begin to use their eyes." She pursed her lips for a moment. "Is your friend new to this work?" she asked, suddenly turning toward me a gaze of frank inspection.
Fuentes smiled. "You would not say so, Señorita, were I free to tell you his name."
"As for that," said I, "where Señor Don Eugenio entrusts his secret I may not hesitate to entrust mine. My name is Manuel MacNeill, Señorita, and I kiss your hands and am at your service."
Luisa rose and dropped me a very stately curtsey. "Happy were I, Don Manuel MacNeill, to welcome you, even if you did not solve our difficulty. You are clever at disguises, I have been told. Well, I have a disguise for you—though not, to be sure, a pleasant one."
"I take the downs with the ups," said I.
"Well, then, Don Diego here is an artist. He can paint you a bunch of grapes so that the birds come to peck at it: moreover, he has studied at the hospital. We must find you a suit of rags, Sir, and Don Diego shall paint you as full of sores as Lazarus."
"And after that?"
"After that you will go to the porch of the New Cathedral, to the shady side of it—look you how I study your comfort—facing on the Square of the Old College: and there you shall collect the alms of the charitable. Many things, I am told, find their way into a beggar's hat."
"Señorita," said Fuentes gravely, with a glance up at the lamp, "it was a good star that led us here to-night."