Contraras grunted. He was not in a very good mood to-night; he had not yet forgiven Luçue for his lack of punctuality.
“Violet Hargrave I know, of course, a friend and protégée of our staunch old comrade Jaques. Moreno I know nothing about. Who is he, what is he?”
Luçue explained. Moreno was a journalist, his father pure Spanish, his mother an Englishwoman. His principles were sound. He was a revolutionary heart and soul.
Contraras was still in the grunting stage. He helped himself to another whiskey.
“You are a judge of men, Luçue; you seldom make mistakes,” he said, in rather a grudging voice.
“I don’t quite like the idea of the English mother. You have thought that all out?”
“Quite,” was the swift reply. “Moreno comes to us with settled convictions. He is, like yourself, a philosophical anarchist.”
It certainly said a good deal for Moreno’s powers of persuasion that he had succeeded in convincing the suspicious Luçue of his sincerity.
The gong sounded for dinner. Contraras kept to his gentlemanly habits; his house was ordered in orthodox fashion. His wife, a faded-looking woman, who had once been a beauty, sat at the head of the table. His daughter, a comely, dark-eyed girl, his only child, faced the guest. Neither wife nor daughter had the slightest sympathy with the peculiar views of the head of the household. As a matter of fact, they thought he was just a trifle insane on this one particular point.
They detested the strange-looking men, some of them in very shabby raiment, who came to this well-appointed house in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, to partake of their chief’s hospitality and drink his choice wines. They marvelled between themselves at the blindness of Contraras. Could he not see that these shabby creatures hated him for his wealth, for the hospitality which they regarded as a form of ostentation?