ed man would have thought of interfering with a marriage. It
was quite time enough to talk of his passion when the others were six or
eight months married!

Of the younger ladies, a few condoled with me, praised my heroism and
my constancy, and threw out sly hints that when I tried my luck next,
fortune might possibly be more generous to me. Don Estaban himself
appeared to sympathize sincerely with my sorrow, and evinced the
warmest sense of gratitude for the past. Even the Fra tried a little
good-nature; but it sat ill upon him, and it was easy to see that he
entertained a great mistrust of me.

From the brief experience of what I suffered in these few days, I am
decidedly of opinion that rich men are far more impatient under reverses
and disappointments than poor ones! It was a marvellous change for one
like me, whose earlier years, it is unnecessary to remind the reader,
were not passed in the lap of that comfortable wet nurse called
"affluence;" and yet with all this brilliant present and still more
fascinating future, at the very first instance of an opposition to my
will, I grew sad, dispirited, and morose. I should have been very angry
with myself for my ingratitude, but that I set it all down to the score
of love; and so I went about the house, visiting each room where Donna
Maria used to sit, reading her books, gazing at her picture, and feeding
my mind with a hundred fancies which the next moment of thought told me
were now impossible.

Don Estaban, whose grief for the loss of his daughter was in a manner
divided with mine, would not suffer me to leave him; and although the
place itself served to keep open the wound of my regret, and the Fra's
presence was anything but conciliatory, I passed several days at the
villa.

It would have been the greatest relief to me could I have persuaded
myself to be candid with Don Estaban, and told him frankly the true
story of my life. I felt that all the consolations which he offered me
were of no avail, simply because I had misled him! The ingenious tissue
of fiction in which I enveloped myself was a web so thin that it tore
whenever I stirred, and my whole time was spent, as it were, in
darning, patching, and piecing the frail garment with which I covered my
nakedness.

A dozen times every day I jumped up, determined to reveal my humble
history; but as regularly did a sentiment of false shame hold me back,
and a dread of old Fra Miguel's malicious leer, should he hea