"El Duque de Carmona!" echoed the Cherub.
"He!" cried Pilar. And they looked at each other.
For a single second, I asked myself if my frankness had been a mistake.
"Santa María, but do we know him!" breathed the girl. "I wish we could tell you no."
The good Cherub shook his head portentously. "The Duke of Carmona is a bad man," he said. "He has not done _us_ any harm--".
"Oh--oh!" Pilar cut him short. "He has not driven into a convent one of my best-loved friends?"
"My daughter refers to a sad story," explained her father. "In Madrid it made a stir at the time. He jilted a school friend of Pilarcita's. That is almost an unheard-of thing in Spain; but he did it. The young girl's family got into trouble at Court--an insignificant affair; but the Duke is ambitious of favour. He had something to retrieve, after the scandal during the Spanish-American War, when he was quite a young man--not more than twenty-four--and--"
"You mean, the story that he speculated in horses--bought wretched crocks cheap and sold them to the army for the cavalry, with the connivance of the vets he's supposed to have bribed?"
"Yes. He managed to clear himself; but the royalties looked at him coldly, and he is not a man to bear that. The father of the girl--Pilarcita's friend--was at one time much liked by the young King, and people thought it was Carmona's motive for engaging himself. With the first breath of the storm the Duke was off; and the discarded fiancée entered as a novice the convent where she and my daughter went to school. That is why Pilarcita so much dislikes him--"
"But it's not all!" cried the girl. "What about the grey bull, poor Corcito."
Colonel O'Donnel laughed his gentle, chuckling laugh.
"Our home is close to a _ganadería_--a bull-farm of the Duke's near Seville," he explained indulgently. "The places adjoin; and as I've allowed this Pilarcita to grow up a wild girl, very different from the young ladies of Seville she should emulate, she has made friends of the Duke's cattle. There were, some years ago, a grey bull that was as tame with her as a pet dog; but it took a dislike to the Duke, who came to have a look at his bulls once, and attacked him. The saying is that the Moorish blood in the Carmonas gives them a cruel temper. At all events, Carmona could not forgive the bull its disrespect, and promptly had it sent off to the slaughter-house, though it was a _toro bravo_."