f that
hovel--a table, a couple of chairs, two chromos on the wall for
decoration, an old mandolin, and some abandoned fish-nets. The place, as
the women of the neighborhood said, had the smell of hunger and
wife-beating.

Rosario looked up as the door slammed open, and the Rector's massive
figure towered over the threshold, completely filling the door-way. "Oh,
it's you!" she said with a bitter smile. She had been waiting for him.
She knew he would come. Wouldn't he have a chair? He had been rough with
her down on the beach, but she didn't mind. "We all feel that way at
first! I couldn't believe it when they first told me about Tonet. I
slapped the face of the woman who came to me. And then, an hour later, I
went and asked her for God's sake to tell the truth. Well, you were
going to kill me a little while ago. And here you are! When people are
really in love ... they get mad at first. But then they want to know the
truth, even if it pulls the heart out of them! We are both fools,
Pascualo!"

The Rector had closed the door behind him, and was standing now in front
of his sister-in-law, his arms folded, looking at her with a scowl of
angry hostility, the instinctive hatred a man feels toward the one who
wrecks his dream.

"The truth, now! The truth! Speak out! All you've got to say!" Pascualo
hissed the threatening words, to put a stop to that everlasting
moralizing of an idiot! Would she never get to the point? Yet, in all
his menacing, raging impatience, there was terror in his soul, the wish
that minutes might turn, almost, to centuries, to postpone the cruel
revelation.

Well, yes, she would tell him everything! But how would he take it? What
she had to say would hurt him terribly, and he must not hate her so for
it. She had had her time of it too. She had suffered now till she could
stand it no longer. She hated Tonet, and she hated that infamous
Dolores! For her Pascualo was simply a comrade in misfortune. Dolores
had been deceiving him. "Oh, it's not a matter of yesterday or day
before. They've been carrying on for years--almost from the time Tonet
and I were married. Tonet was a good boy. But when that thing saw some
one else have him for a husband, she set her eyes on him, and she was
the one who first led him astray."

"Bosh!" roared the Rector, blind with fury and anguish. "I want proofs!
I'm tired of your talk. Proofs! Proofs, Rosario! And be quick about it."

Rosario smiled pityingly at sight of suc