The
Alcazar, the cigarette-girls, the Gipsy dancers of Triana, the old brown
ruins to which they rode, the streets, and the square with its grave
talkers sitting on benches in the sun, the water-sellers and the melons;
the mules, and the dark ragged man out of a dream, picking up the ends
of cigarettes, the wine of Malaga, burnt fire and honey! Seville had
bewitched them--they got no further. They had come back across the brown
uplands of Castile to Madrid and Goya and Velasquez, till it was time
for Paris, before the law-term began. There, in a queer little French
hotel--all bedrooms, and a lift, coffee and carved beds, wood fires,
and a chambermaid who seemed all France, and down below a restaurant,
to which such as knew about eating came, with waiters who looked like
monks, both fat and lean--they had spent a week. Three special memories
of that week started up in the moonlight before Gyp's eyes: The long
drive in the Bois among the falling leaves of trees flashing with colour
in the crisp air under a brilliant sky. A moment in the Louvre before
the Leonardo "Bacchus," when--his "restored" pink skin forgotten--all
the world seemed to drop away while she listened, with the listening
figure before her, to some mysterious music of growing flowers and
secret life. And that last most disconcerting memory, of the night
before they returned. They were having supper after the theatre in their
restaurant, when, in a mirror she saw three people come in and take
seats at a table a little way behind--Fiorsen, Rosek, and Daphne
Wing! How she managed to show no sign she never knew! While they were
ordering, she was safe, for Rosek was a gourmet, and the girl would
certainly be hungry; but after that, she knew that nothing could save
her being seen--Rosek would mark down every woman in the room! Should
she pretend to feel faint and slip out into the hotel? Or let Bryan
know? Or sit there laughing and talking, eating and drinking, as if
nothing were behind her?
Her own face in the mirror had a flush, and her eyes were bright.
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