"Too late be damned," observed Tony calmly. "Even if Da Freitas has got hold of her, do you imagine I am going to let him keep her? I know now that I want Isabel more than anything else in the world. I have always been accustomed to have what I want, and it's a very bad thing to change one's habits suddenly at my age."
Guy made a kind of hopeless gesture with his hands. "But what can you do?" he demanded. "You have seen the papers this morning—you know what's happening in Livadia? The odds are they will take her straight over there and marry her to Pedro right away."
"Then I shall go over and fetch her back," replied Tony firmly. "I am not going to allow any silly old-fashioned ideas about the sanctity of marriage to interfere with my life's happiness."
Guy opened his mouth to speak, but he was suddenly interrupted by the grinding scrunch of a second motor pulling up abruptly outside the house. Almost at the same moment the bell rang with a prolonged violence that echoed up from the basement.
"I rather think that must be Congosta," said Tony.
He crossed the hall, and pulling back the latch, opened the front door.
The visitor was Señor Congosta, but his most intimate friends might have been pardoned if for a moment they had failed to recognize him. Hatless, dishevelled, and with a long smear of blood at the corner of his mouth, he looked as if he had been taking part in a rather closely contested Irish election.
"So!" he observed, drawing himself up and glaring at Tony, "you have betrayed me."
Tony stepped towards him.
"Don't be silly," he said. "Come along in and sit down."