“I!”—and Quentin hesitated as one loath to confess—“Not I.”
“Ah!—Yes, yes!” insisted the Frenchwoman, “you have killed a sweetheart. One can see it in your face.”
“My dear,” said her husband, “do not press him: the Spaniards are too noble to talk about some things.”
Quentin looked at the Frenchman and winked his eye confidentially, giving him to understand that he had divined the true cause of his reserve. Then he feigned a melancholy air to conceal the joy this farce afforded him. After that, he diverted himself by looking through the window.
“What a bore this weather is,” he murmured.
He had always pictured his arrival at Cordova as taking place on a glorious day of golden sunshine, and instead, he was encountering despicable weather, damp, ugly, and sad.
“I suppose the same thing will happen to everything I have planned. Nothing turns out as you think it will. That, according to my schoolmate Harris, is an advantage. I’m not so sure. It is a matter for discussion.”
This memory of his schoolmate made him think of Eton school.
“I wonder what they are doing there now?”
Absorbed in his memories, he continued to look out the window. As the train advanced, the country became more cultivated. Well-shaped horses with long tails were grazing in the pastures.