For a single second, I asked myself if my frankness had been a mistake.
“You know the Duke?” I asked.
“Santa María, but do we know him!” breathed the girl. “I wish we could tell you no.”
“You don't like him?”
“Do we like the Duke, Papa?”
The good Cherub shook his head portentously. “The Duke of Carmona is a bad man,” he said. “He has not done us any harm—”.
“Oh—oh!” Pilar cut him short. “He has not driven into a convent one of my best-loved friends?”
“My daughter refers to a sad story,” explained her father. “In Madrid it made a stir at the time. He jilted a school friend of Pilarcita's. That is almost an unheard-of thing in Spain; but he did it. The young girl's family got into trouble at Court—an insignificant affair; but the Duke is ambitious of favour. He had something to retrieve, after the scandal during the Spanish-American [pg 74]War, when he was quite a young man—not more than twenty-four—and—”
“You mean, the story that he speculated in horses—bought wretched crocks cheap and sold them to the army for the cavalry, with the connivance of the vets he's supposed to have bribed?”
“Yes. He managed to clear himself; but the royalties looked at him coldly, and he is not a man to bear that. The father of the girl—Pilarcita's friend—was at one time much liked by the young King, and people thought it was Carmona's motive for engaging himself. With the first breath of the storm the Duke was off; and the discarded fiancée entered as a novice the convent where she and my daughter went to school. That is why Pilarcita so much dislikes him—”