“I believe you, I believe you”; returned the young man simply, and with an accent of sincerity. “You have the name of being eccentric, eccentric, but frank as well. Besides, I am an expert, an expert, an expert in the matter, and I can recognize a lady——”
As he spoke he bowed for the third time to Lucía, with easy grace. The latter rose with instinctive dignity, and with a serious and composed air returned the salute. Artegui then advanced and uttered the prescribed formula:
“Señor Don Pedro Gonzalvo, the Señora de Miranda.”
“Miranda—yes, yes, I saw the name, I saw the name on the hotel register. I know a Miranda who was to have been married about this time—an old bachelor, an old bachelor?”
“Don Aurelio?” Lucía asked involuntarily.
“Precisely. I am intimate, intimate with him.”
“He is my husband,” murmured Lucía.
The young man’s face flushed with eager curiosity, and he once more fixed his small eyes on Lucía’s countenance, which he scanned with implacable tenacity.
“Miranda—ah, so you are the wife, the wife of Aurelio Miranda!” he repeated, without further comment. But discreetly-repressed curiosity was so apparent in his manner, that Artegui imposed upon himself the task of giving the young man a full and minute account of all that had occurred. Gonzalvo listened in silence, repressing with the discreetness of the man of the world the malicious smile that rose to his lips. It was evident that the comical conjugal mishap of the middle-aged rake diverted the youthful rake excessively. A stray sunbeam, breaking through the gray clouds, threw into relief the blonde, lymphatic countenance of the young man,—the freckled skin, the delicate but characteristically marked features. His white hands, resembling those of a woman, played with his steel watch-chain; on the little finger of one of them gleamed a large carbuncle, side by side with another ring, a school-girl’s simple trinket—a little cross of pearls set in a hoop of gold, much too small for the finger it encircled.
“So that you know nothing, nothing of Miranda’s whereabouts,” he asked, when he had heard the narration to the end.