Leon pointed to the door, but he did not speak.
She looked at him with pathetic devotion, but suddenly lifting her hand she laid it on his head and with the strength of intense passion she grasped his hair and pulled him down. He was forced to bend—lower, lower; she held his head with both hands for an instant, and then she hit it—as if it were a thing she could break.
“It is my turn,” she said in a broken voice—“mine, to—pull your hair!” Leon pulled himself up—half-angry, half-forgiving.
“Go,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied, “good-bye. I do not wish to bring disgrace upon you. I will go at once. My heart is bursting—it chokes me to cry and to run. Do not follow me.”
She slipped a key into the lock of the museum door, which opened from one corner of the room they were in, and vanished in the darkness. Leon departed by the way by which he had come, returning to his post like a faithful soldier.
CHAPTER XV.
LATET ANGUIS.
In the course of that afternoon Don Pedro Fúcar had invited Doña Pilar de San Salomó—whom we have seen looking on at the interesting spectacle of her friend swallowing an ice in the Chinese boudoir—to go round the hot-houses with him, and cast a glance, by the way, at the English horses he had just had sent to him from a famous stable in London. The worthy money-dealer, the “product of his century,” the noble who derived his patent, not indeed from battles against the Moors, but at any rate from contracts with good Christians, was well aware of the small estimation in which he was held by Pilar. Still, not content with having the exchequer of both hemispheres at his feet, he was very anxious to stand in the good graces of the initiated, so he overwhelmed his guest with attentions and civilities. Besides displaying with more than usual zeal all the splendours of Suertebella, he presented to her some of the treasures it contained: exotic flowers in costly vases, rare fruits, and, to crown all, some sacred relics from the altars in his chapel. With all his habits of politeness the moneyed magnate could not conceal that each gift cost him a greater pang than the last, and at length so far forgot himself as to sigh deeply, gazing at the ground, as though he might there see written in mysterious characters—like the binomial theorem on Newton’s tomb—the formula of a bargain or a loan which might bring the very earth we dwell on into the money safe of the Fúcars.