 remember. But as to
that opinions may differ.
    This, his first great adventure, as he calls it, begins in Marseilles. It
ends there, too. Yet it might have happened anywhere. This does not mean that
the people concerned could have come together in pure space. The locality had a
definite importance. As to the time, it is easily fixed by the events at about
the middle years of the seventies, when Don Carlos de Bourbon, encouraged by the
general reaction of all Europe against the excesses of communistic
Republicanism, made his attempt for the throne of Spain, arms in hand, amongst
the hills and gorges of Guipuzcoa. It is perhaps the last instance of a
Pretender's adventure for a Crown that History will have to record with the
usual grave moral disapproval tinged by a shamefaced regret for the departing
romance. Historians are very much like other people.
    However, History has nothing to do with this tale. Neither is the moral
justification or condemnation of conduct aimed at here. If anything, it is
perhaps a little sympathy that the writer expects for his buried youth, as he
lives it over again at the end of his insignificant course on this earth.
Strange persons - yet perhaps not so very different from ourselves.
    A few words as to certain facts may be added.
    It may seem that he was plunged very abruptly into this long adventure. But
from certain passages (suppressed here because mixed up with irrelevant matter)
it appears clearly that at the time of the meeting in the café, Mills had
already gathered, in various quarters, a definite view of the eager youth who
had been introduced to him in that ultra-legitimist salon. What Mills had
learned represented him as a young gentleman who had arrived furnished with
proper credentials and who apparently was doing his best to waste his life in an
eccentric fashion, with a bohemian set (one poet, at least, emerged out of it
later) on one side, and on the other making friends with the people of the Old
Town, pilots, coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts. He pretended rather
absurdly to be a seaman himself and was already credited with an ill-defined and
vaguely illegal enterprise in the Gulf of Mexico. At once it occurred to Mills
that this eccentric youngster was the very person for what the legitimist
sympathizers had very much at heart just then: to organize a supply by sea of
arms and ammunition to the Carlist detachments in the South. It was precisely to
confer on that matter with Doña Rita that Captain Blunt had been despatched from
Headquarters.
    Mills got in touch with
