As he went through his toilette, which he did very carefully, and putting on now linen of dazzling whiteness, with which the most scrupulous person could have found no fault, his thoughts still ran upon the subject that had occupied his mind entirely for many days.
"There is danger in it, of course," he muttered to himself; "but I am used to danger; there was danger when Gonzalez provoked me, though it was not as great as that I stand in now. These English are stupid, but they are crafty also, and it may be that a trap will be set for me, perhaps is set already. Well, I will escape from it as I have from others. And, after all, I have one damning proof in my favour, one card that, if I am forced to play, must save me! What I have to do, shall be done to-day. I am resolved!"
His toilette was finished now, he was clean-shaved and well dressed from head to foot, and the Señor Miguel Guffanta stood in his room a very different-looking man from the one who had sat, an hour ago, smoking cigarettes in the hotel passage. Before he left it, he unlocked a portmanteau, and took from it a pocket-book into which he looked for a moment, and then he locked his door and descended the stairs.
"Going out for the day, Señor?" Diaz asked, as he peered out of his box.
"Yes. I am going to make a call on an English friend. Adios."
"Adios, Señor."
"It is as hot as Honduras," Señor Guffanta said to himself as he crossed to the shady side of the street. "I must walk slowly to keep myself cool."
He did walk slowly, making his way through Leicester Square and down Piccadilly, and, at nearly the bottom of the latter, turned off to the right and passed through several streets. Then, when he had arrived at a house which stood at a corner he stopped. He evidently had been here before, for he had found his way without any difficulty through the labyrinth of streets between this house and Leicester Square, and now he paused for one moment previous to mounting the doorstep. But, before he did so, he turned away and went a short distance down a side-street. The big house outside which he was standing formed the angle of two streets, and ran down the side one that the Señor had now turned into. At the back of it was a garden, fairly filled with trees, that ran some distance farther down this street, and into which an open-worked iron gate led, a gate through which any passerby could look. It was not a well-kept garden, and in it there was some undergrowth; and it was at this undergrowth, on the farthest right hand side, that Señor Guffanta peered for some few moments through the iron gate.
"It seems the same," he muttered to himself; "nothing appears disturbed since I was last here." Then he returned to the front of the house, and mounting the steps knocked at the hall door.
The footman who opened it had no time to ask the tall, well-dressed foreigner with the handsome face, who was standing before him, what he required, before the Señor said, in good English: