er to arrive sooner.

Esteban was astounded to see that his mother did not accept this
absence as an insignificant event. The good lady appeared greatly
troubled and her eyes filled with tears. Her feminine instinct made her
suspect something ominous in her husband's delay.

In the afternoon, when her old lover, the professor, visited her as
usual, the two talked slowly with guarded words but with eyes of
understanding and long intervals of silence.

When Don Pedro reached the height of his glorious career, the
possession of a professorship in the institute of Barcelona, he used to
visit Cinta every afternoon, passing an hour and a half in her parlor
with chronometric exactitude. Never did the slightest impure thought
agitate the professor. The past had fallen into oblivion.... But he
needed to see daily the captain's wife weaving laces with her two
little nieces, as he had seen Ferragut's widow years before.

He informed them of the most important events in Barcelona and in the
entire world; they would comment together on the future of Esteban, and
the former suitor used to listen rapturously to her sweet voice,
conceding great importance to the details of domestic economy or
descriptions of religious fiestas, solely because it was she who was
recounting them.

Many times they would remain in a long silence. Don Pedro represented
patience, even temper, and silent respect, in that tranquil and
immaculate house which lost its monastic calm only when its head
presented himself there for a few days between voyages.

Cinta had accustomed herself to the professor's visits. At half-past
three by the clock his footsteps could always be heard in the
passageway.

If any afternoon he did not come, the sweet Penelope was greatly
disappointed.

"I wonder what can be the matter with Don Pedro?" she would ask her
nieces uneasily.

She oftentimes asked this question of her son; but Esteban, without
exactly hating the visitor, appreciated him very slightly.

Don Pedro belonged to that group of gentlemen at the Institute whom the
government paid to annoy youth with their explanations and their
examinations. He still remembered the two years that he had passed in
his course, as in the torture chamber, enduring the torments of Latin.
Besides that, the professor was a timid man who was always afraid of
catching cold, and who never dared to venture into the street on cloudy
days without an umbrella. Let people talk to him about