So saying, Asneiros took up his hat, and with a low bow to Marcelino left the room.
In the porch he was somewhat startled to find Don Carlos Evaña in earnest conversation with Magdalen, but passed them without a word and walked away.
"He knows nothing, and cannot assist me in any way," he muttered to himself as he slowly crossed the Plaza Miserere; "but I should like to have the inspection of that black coffer of his, he has some reason for keeping it so secret. Don Roderigo would be glad of any pretext for putting him in prison and looking through his papers. I'll give him one, who knows but I may do myself a service too?"
Don Carlos and Marcelino remained for two hours longer at the quinta, and had the pleasure of drinking tea once more from the porcelain cups of Magdalen Miranda, but the evening was not a pleasant one to any of them—there was a general feeling of constraint. Don Alfonso trembled at every noise, and was more than usually taciturn; Magdalen seemed confused, and spoke only in whispers.
As the two friends rode back to the city together through the darkness, Don Carlos spoke.
"I told her of the reports that are in circulation concerning her and this Señor Asneiros," he said. "It may be her father's wish but it is not hers, nor does she think that the major has any idea of it. She says that he has been a constant spy upon her father for more than a year past, and that she warned her father of him, but that he refused to listen to her."
"Poor girl!" said Marcelino, and then rode on in moody silence, hardly hearing a word of what Evaña said after that, till they reached the centre of the city and separated.
When Asneiros left the Miserere he walked straight to the house of Don Roderigo Ponce de Leon, with whom he had a long interview, the result of which was, that at midnight a party of soldiers, under the command of the major, proceeded to the Quinta de Don Alfonso, woke up the inmates by knocking at the door, and shouted to them to "open in the name of the law." Don Alfonso was arrested and his private room rigorously searched, but for some time nothing worthy of notice was found, till Asneiros, prodding the wall behind the bedstead with his sword, discovered a hollow carefully concealed by the wainscot. Not knowing how to open it, he ordered a panel to be wrenched away, and disclosed a small coffer of black oak, bound with brass and very heavy, which he took away with him, together with all the letters and written papers he could find, while Don Alfonso, more dead than alive, was lifted into a small cart and driven away to the Cabildo, where he was imprisoned in the same apartment which had formerly been occupied by Marcelino Ponce de Leon.
During the examination of Don Alfonso's room all the inmates of the quinta had been, by the major's command, imprisoned in the sala. When he had secured the black coffer he prosecuted the search no further, but proceeding to the sala, ordered Don Alfonso to come out alone, saying that he merely wished to speak with him for a minute. Magdalen appeared with her father, clinging to him, when Asneiros rudely pushed her back into the room and shut the door, placing a guard there with instructions to allow no one to leave the house before sunrise.
On the morning following this arrest Don Fausto Velasquez, who was an early riser, was walking about in his patio, wrapped in a loose dressing-gown, when a girl, enveloped from head to foot in a large shawl, hurriedly came in through the open doorway, and, throwing herself upon her knees at his feet, caught his hand in both her own, crying: