"It is strange, too," he said once to himself in the night, when, having been unable to sleep, he had risen and thrown his window open and was gazing from it, "that I cannot meet this man Smerdon, this man who believes that I shall fail--as, por Dios! I almost now myself believe! Strange, also, that he should have left on the very day I came here. I should like to see him. It may be that I shall do so in London to-morrow."
He left Occleve Chase at the time fixed, and by his liberality to the housekeeper and the other servants who had waited on him he entirely dispelled from their minds the idea that he was a picture-dealer.
"I suppose he is one of those foreign swells, after all," the footman who had served him said to the housekeeper, as he pocketed the douceur the Señor had given him; "there is plenty of 'em in London Society now."
He reached the London terminus late in the afternoon, and bade the cabman he hired drive him to the Hôtel Lepanto; but, before half the journey to that house was accomplished, the driver found himself suddenly called on by his fare to stop, and to turn round and follow another cab going in the opposite direction.
A hansom cab which had passed swiftly the one Señor Guffanta was in, a cab in which was seated a young man with a brown moustache, and on the roof of which was a portmanteau and a bundle of rugs.
"Quick!" the Señor said, speaking for the first time almost incoherent English; "follow that cab with the valise on the top. Quick, I say! I will pay you anything!"
"How can I be quick!" the man said with an oath, "when I can hardly turn my cab round? Which is the one you mean?"
"The one with the valise, I say, that passed just now. I will give you everything I have in my pockets if you catch it."
But it was no use. Before the cab could be turned and put in pursuit, the other one had disappeared round a corner into a short street, from which, ere Señor Guffanta's cab had reached it, it had again disappeared.
"Blood of my father!" the Señor said to himself in Spanish, "am I never to seize him?" Then he once more altered his directions to the cabman, and bade him drive to Occleve House.