ling the cabby to beat the horse,
to go full speed, for fear of being late.

He knew that it would be hours before she came, if she did come; but a
mad, unreasonable impatience filled him. He thought without knowing why
that, by arriving ahead of time, he would hasten the countess's coming.

He got out in the square in front of the little palace of Moncloa. The
cab disappeared in the direction of Madrid, up hill along an avenue that
was lost in the distance behind an arch of dry branches.

Renovales walked up and down, alone in the little square. The sun was
shining in a patch of blue sky, among the heavy clouds. In the places
which its rays did not reach, it was cold. The water ran down from the
foot of the trees, after dripping from the branches and trickling down
the trunks; it was melting rapidly. The wood seemed to weep with joy
under the caress of the sun, that destroyed the last traces of the white
shroud.

The majestic silence of Nature, abandoned to its own power, surrounded
the artist. The pines were swinging with the long gusts of wind, filling
space with a murmur, like the sound of distant harps. The square was
hidden in the icy shadow of the trees. Up above in the front of the
palace some pigeons, seeking the sun above the tops of the pines, swept
around the old flagpole and the classic busts blackened by the weather.
Then, tired of flying, they settled down on the rusty iron balconies,
adding to the old building a white fluttering decoration, a rustling
garland of feathers. In the middle of the square a marble swan, with its
neck violently stretched toward the sky, threw out a jet, whose murmur
seemed to heighten the impression of icy cold which he felt in the
shadow.

Renovales began to walk, crushing the frozen crust that cracked under
his feet in the shady places. He leaned over the circular iron rail that
surrounds a part of the square. Through the curtain of black branches,
where the first buds were beginning to open, he saw the ridge that
bounds the horizon; the mountains of Guadarrama, phantoms of snow that
were mingled with the masses of clouds. Nearer, the mountains of Pardo
stood out with their dark peaks, black with pines, and to the left
stretched out the slopes of the hills of the Casa de Campo, where the
first yellow touches of spring were beginning to show.

At his feet lay the fields of Moncloa, the antique little gardens, the
grove of Viveros, bordering the stream. Carriages were mov