eem possible that this affection could have ended so coldly. He was
surprised at the indifference of the last years; he no longer remembered
the troubles of their life together; he saw his wife now as she was in
her youth, with her calm face, her quiet smile and admiration in her
eyes.

He continued to read, passing eagerly from letter to letter. He wondered
at his own youth, virtuous in spite of his passionate nature, at the
chastity of his devotion to his wife, the only, the unquestionable one.
He experienced the joy, tinged with melancholy, which a decrepit old man
feels at the contemplation of his youthful portrait. And he had been
like that! From the bottom of his soul, a stern voice seemed to rise in
a reproachful tone, "Yes, like that, when you were good, when you were
honorable."

He became so absorbed in his reading that he did not notice the lapse of
time. Suddenly he heard steps in the distant hallway, the rustle of
skirts, his daughter's voice. Outside the house a horn was tooting; his
haughty son-in-law telling him to hurry; trembling with fear at the
prospect of being discovered, he took the insignia and the ribbons out
of their cases and hastily closed the door of the clothes-press.

The reception of the Academy was almost a failure for Renovales. The
countess found him very interesting, with his face pale with excitement,
his breast starred with jewels and his shirt front cut with several
bright lines of colors. But as soon as he stood up amid general
curiosity, with his manuscript in his hand, and began to read the first
paragraphs, a murmur arose which kept increasing and finally drowned out
his voice. He read thickly, with the haste of a school-boy who wants to
have it over, without noticing what he was saying, in a monotonous
sing-song. The sonorous rehearsals in the studio, the careful
preparation of dramatic gestures was forgotten. His mind seemed to be
somewhere else, far away from that ceremony; his eyes saw nothing but
the letters. The fashionable assemblage went out, glad they had gathered
and seen each other again. Many lips laughed at the speech behind their
gauze fans, delighted to be able to scratch indirectly his friend the
Alberca woman.

"Awful, my dear! Insufferably boring!"

II

As soon as he awoke the next day, Renovales felt that he must have open
air, light, space, and he went out of the house, not stopping in his
walk, up the Castellana, until he reached the clearing