agoons.

Renovales, who had feared for Josephina's life, believing that her weak,
delicate constitution could not stand the shock, broke out into cries of
joy when he received the little one in his arms and looked at the mother
with her head resting on the pillow as if she were dead. Her white face
was hardly outlined against the white of the linen. His first thought
was for her, for the pale features, distorted by the recent crisis,
which gradually were growing calmer with rest. Poor little girl! How she
had suffered! But as he tip-toed out of the bed room in order not to
disturb the heavy sleep that, after two cruel days, had overpowered the
sick woman, he gave himself up to his admiration for the bit of flesh
that lay in the huge flabby arms of the grandmother, wrapped in fine
linen. Ah, what a dear little thing! He looked at the livid little face,
the big head, thinly covered with hair, seeking for some suggestion of
himself in this surge of flesh that was in motion and still without
definite form. "Mamma, whom does she look like?"

Dona Emilia was surprised at his blindness. Whom; should she look like?
Like him, no one but him. She was large, enormous; she had seen few
babies as large as this one. It did not seem possible that her poor
daughter could live after giving birth to "that." They could not
complain that she was not healthy; she was as ruddy as a country baby.

"She's a Renovales; she's yours, wholly yours, Mariano. We belong to a
different class."

And Renovales, without noticing his mother's words, saw only that his
daughter was like him, overjoyed to see how robust she was, shouting his
pleasure at the health of which the grandmother spoke in a disappointed
tone.

In vain did he and Dona Emilia try to dissuade Josephina from nursing
the baby. The little woman, in spite of the weakness that kept her
motionless in bed, wept and cried almost as she had in the crises that
had so terrified Renovales.

"I won't have it," she said with that obstinacy that made her so
terrible.

"I won't have a strange woman's milk for my daughter. I will nurse her,
her mother."

And they had to give the baby to her.

When Josephina seemed recovered, her mother, feeling that her mission
was over, went home to Madrid. She was bored to death in that silent
city of Venice, night after night she thought she was dead, for she
could not hear a single sound from her bed. The calm, interrupted now
and then by the shouts of