man would be
sleeping under the same roof with his wife. But this unworthy suspicion
lasted hardly a second. The engineer realized that Berlanga, though a
riotous, dissipated chap, was at heart a brotherly friend, far from base
enough to betray him in any such horrible manner.

Rafaela went with her husband to the stairway. There they both began
again to inflame each other with ardent kisses and embraces of farewell.
The wife's black eyes filled with tears as she told him to keep himself
well bundled up and to think often of her. Tears quite blinded her.

"What a good lass she is!" murmured Zureda.

And as he recalled the poisonous doubt of a moment before, the man's
ingenuous nobility felt shame.

* * * * *

The life of Manolo Berlanga turned out to be pretty disreputable. He
liked wine, women and song, and many a time came home in the wee small
hours, completely paralyzed. This invariably happened during the absence
of the engineer. Next morning he was always very remorseful, and went
with contrition to the kitchen, where Rafaela was getting breakfast.

"Are you mad at me?" he used to ask.

She answered him in a maternal kind of way and told him to be good; this
always made him laugh.

"None o' that!" he used to say. "I don't like being good. That's one of
the many inflictions marriage forces on a man. Don't you have enough
'being good' in this house, with Amadeo?"

Among men, love is often nothing more than the carnal obsession produced
in them by the constant and repeated sight of one and the same woman.
Every laugh, every motion of the woman moving about them possesses a
charm at first hardly noticed. But after a while, under the spell of a
phenomenon we may call cumulative, this charm waxes potent; it grows
till some time it unexpectedly breaks forth in an enveloping, conquering
passion.

Now one morning it happened that Manolo Berlanga was eating breakfast in
the dining-room before going to the shop. Rafaela, her back toward him,
was scrubbing the floor of the hallway.

"How you do work, my lady!" cried the silversmith, jokingly.

Her answer was a gay-toned laugh; then she went on with her task,
sometimes recoiling so that she almost sat on her heels, again
stretching her body forward with an energy that lowered the
tight-corseted slimness of her waist and set in motion the fullness of
her yielding hips. The silversmith had often seen her thus, without
having paid any