'This is the document in question,' he said. 'Those crooked and fantastic characters are terrible. I often wonder if the writers were able to read them.'
'You are fortunate to be the possessor of such things,' I remarked.
He shrugged his shoulders.
'What good are they? I would sooner have fifty pesetas than this musty parchment.'
An offer! I quickly reckoned it out into English money. He would doubtless have taken less, but I felt a certain delicacy in bargaining with a duke over his family secrets....
'Do you mean it? May I—er—'
He sprang towards me.
'Take it, my dear sir, take it. Shall I give you a receipt?'
And so, for thirty-one shillings and threepence, I obtained the only authentic account of how the frailty of the illustrious Señora Doña Sodina was indirectly the means of raising her husband to the highest dignities in Spain.