y and
without malice, he loved them all; and was the most given to
complimenting the girls, and making them laugh, of any old man for ten
leagues around.

I have already said that he was the uncle of Pepita. When he was nearing
his eightieth year, she was about to complete her sixteenth. He was
rich; she, poor and friendless.

Her mother was a vulgar woman of limited intelligence and coarse
instincts. She worshiped her daughter, yet lamented continually and with
bitterness the sacrifices she made for her, the privations she
suffered, and the disconsolate old age and melancholy end that awaited
her in the midst of her poverty. She had, besides, a son, older than
Pepita, who had a well-deserved reputation in the village as a gambler
and a quarrelsome fellow, and for whom, after many difficulties, she had
succeeded in obtaining an insignificant employment in Havana; thus
finding herself rid of him, and with the sea between them. After he had
been a few years in Havana, however, he lost his situation on account of
his bad conduct, and thereupon began to shower letters upon his mother,
containing demands for money. The latter, who had scarcely enough for
herself and for Pepita, grew desperate at this, broke out into abuse,
cursed herself and her destiny with a perseverance but little resembling
the evangelical virtue, and ended by fixing all her hopes upon settling
her daughter well, as the only way of getting out of her difficulties.

In this distressing situation Don Gumersindo began to frequent the house
of Pepita and her mother, and to pay attentions to the former with more
ardor and persistence than he had shown in his attentions to other
girls. Nevertheless, to suppose that a man who had passed his eightieth
year without wishing to marry, should think of committing such a folly,
with one foot already in the grave, was so wild and improbable a
notion, that Pepita's mother, still less Pepita herself, never for a
moment suspected the audacious intentions of Don Gumersindo. Thus it was
that both were struck, one day, with amazement, when, after a good many
compliments between jest and earnest, Don Gumersindo, with the greatest
seriousness and without the least hesitation, proposed the following
categorical question:

"Pepita, will you marry me?"

Although the question came at the end of a great deal of joking, and
might itself be taken for a joke, Pepita, who, inexperienced though she
was in worldly matters, yet knew