"Of what do you speak now—what signs?" asked Felicidad, bewildered.
Jacinto Quesada explained. Then he said, "Proceed with your story, dear Felicidad."
Continuing, therefore, Felicidad told how Jacques Ferou, intent on showing how consummately clever he was at all criminal business, and not averse to filling his young wife with awe and fear of him, led up at last to the business that had brought him to Spain and to the house of Don Jaime de Torreblanca y Moncada.
Once upon a time, he had indeed worked for the Paris book house whose card he had used to introduce himself to the haughty hidalgo. He had been hired by a very rich and very crazy bibliophile to get feloniously, as it was beyond even the bibliomaniac's purse, a certain precious book in the possession of the Paris firm; and the better to steal the ancient volume, he had hired himself as a clerk to them for three months.
Through another clerk still in their employ—a hunchbacked fellow whom he had picked out, with a criminal's sure instinct, as a weakling inclined to dishonesty and crime of a sort—he had secured Don Jaime's letter offering the books for sale, before any one but his ally and friend, the hunchback, had a chance to see it.
Now, he knew a little about rare books; so he practiced talking about books like a bibliophile and buyer; and very shortly, he started for Spain. But he traveled slowly for a certain reason.
When he told her this last, Felicidad asked him:
"But for what reason did you travel slowly?"
Jacques Ferou looked at Felicidad in a pity that, perhaps, amounted to a contempt.
"Why, you silly baby!" laughed he. "After all I have said, don't you know why it was I traveled all the way from Paris to your father's house in Andalusia?"