“What are you doing in Barcelona?” asks the Spaniard.
“The devil only knows, my dear man. I don’t.”
“I hope he had nothing to do with your coming here--idle hands, you know.”
The Englishman sat gravely down on a small granite column and reflected.
“No,” he answered after a pause, “it was not that. I left England because I wanted to get away from--Well, from an old woman who wants me to marry her daughter. I went to Monte Carlo, and, if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m hanged if she didn’t follow me, bringing the poor girl with her.”
The Spaniard smiled gravely.
“A willing victim!”
“No, Lloseta, you’re wrong there. That’s the beastly part of it. That girl, sir, was actually shivering with fright one night when the old woman managed to leave us on the terrace together. Some one else, you know!”
The dark eyes looking across towards Majorca were not pleasant to contemplate.
“However,” pursued the ingenuous parti, “I spoke to her as one might have done to another chap, you know. I said, ‘You’re frightened of something.’ She didn’t answer. ‘You’re afraid that I’m going to ask you to marry me.’ ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Well, I’m not. I’m not such a cad.’ And after that we got on all right. She would have told who it was if I had let her. Two days later I sloped off here. Spain choked her off--the old lady, I mean.”