Reading of the whole agony, choking but self-possessed, she read: the Vizcaya, Almirante Oquendo, and the rest; the death of Villamil, he who at least redeemed the promise made to the Mother of his God in Cadiz before he put to sea.

And as she read the old man gave no sign, sitting impassive as a fakir, or like an Indian warrior at the stake.

She went on reading; the fleet steamed through the hell of shot and shell, took fire, was beached, blew up, and still he gave no sign.

Cervera steps on board the conqueror’s ship, weeping, gives up his sword, and the old man sat still.

When all was finished, and the last vessel burning on the rocks, slowly the tears fell down his old brown cheeks, and he broke silence. “Virgen de Guadalupe, has not one escaped?” and the girl, looking at him through her now misty eyes, “No, papa, God has so willed it. . . . What is wrong with your moustache?”

Then, with an effort, he took down his grief, said quietly, “I must change my hairdresser,” got up, and offering his daughter his arm, walked out impassible, through the thick ranks of the defeated foe.

ROTHENBERGER’S WEDDING

Short and broad-shouldered, with the flaxen hair and porcelain-coloured eyes of the true man of Kiel or Koenigsberg, Dr. Karl Rothenberger prided himself on being a townsman of the Great Kant, “who make the critique of pure sense.” For him in vain the modern mystic spread his nets; his mass, his psychological research, his ethics based on the saving of his own gelatinous soul, said nothing to the man of Koenigsberg. His work to minister by electricity to the rheumatic, the gouty; to those who had loved perhaps well, but certainly in a vicarious and post-prandial fashion; his passion fishing with a float; a “goode felawe,” not too refined, but yet well educated; his literary taste bounded by idealistic novels about materialistic folk, and the drum-taps of the bards of Anglo-Saxon militarism; the doctor looked on the world as a vast operating theatre, sparing not even his own foibles in his diagnosis of mankind. All sentiment he held if not accursed, yet as superfluous, and though he did not pride himself exactly on his opinions, knowing them well to be but the result of education, and of a few molecules of iron, more or less, in the composition of his blood, yet would deliver them to all and sundry, as he were lecturing to students in a university. Women he held inferior to men, as really do almost all men, although they fear to say so; but again, he said, “de womens they have occupy my mind since I was eighteen years.”

So after many wanderings in divers lands, he came, as wise men will, to London, and set up his household gods in a vast plane-tree-planted square (with cat ground in the middle called a garden), and of which the residents each had a key, but never walked in, sat in, or used in any way, though all of them would have gone to the stake rather than see a member of the public enter into its sacred precincts, or a stray child play in it, unless attended by a nurse.

Honours and fees fell thick on Rothenberger, and he became greatly belettered, member of many a learned, dull society. He duly purchased a degree; and squares and crescents quite a mile away sent out their patients, and were filled with the sonorous glory of his name. One thing was wanting, and that one thing troubled him not a little; but he yet saw it was inevitable if he would rise to Harley Street or Saville Row, and the sleek pair of horses which (without bearing-reins) testify to a doctor’s status in the scientific world. A wife, or as he said, a “real legitimate,” to prove to all his patients that he was a moral man. Strange that the domestic arrangements of a public man should militate for or against him; but so it is, at least in England, where even if a man cheat and spread ruin to thousands, yet he may find apologists, chiefly, of course, amongst that portion of the public who have not suffered by his delinquencies, so that his life be what is known as pure. Morals and purity in our group of islands seem to condone drunkenness, lies, and even theft (so that the sum stolen be large enough), and to have crystallized themselves into a censorship of precisely the very thing as to which no man or woman has the right to call another to account.