ws along broad straight walks of red earth.
On either side of the approach to the house was a tangle of tall
rose-bushes on which the first buds, heralds of an early spring, were
already beginning to appear.

Above the chattering of the sparrows and the rustle of the wind in the
trees, Rafael could hear the sound of a piano--the keys barely touched
by the player's fingers--and a soft, timid voice, as if the song were
meant for the singer alone.

It was she. Rafael knew the music: a _Lied_ by Schubert--the favorite
composer of the day; a master "whose best work was still unknown," as
she said in the cant she had learned from the critics, alluding to the
fact that only the least subtle of the melancholy composer's works had
thus far been popularized.

The young man advanced slowly, cautiously, as if afraid lest the sound
of his footsteps break in upon that melody which seemed to be rocking
the garden lovingly to sleep in the afternoon's golden sunlight.

He reached the open space in front of the house and once more found
there the same murmuring palms, the same rubblework benches with seats
and backs of flowered tile that he knew so well. There, in fact, she had
so often laughed at his feverish protestations.

The door was closed; but through a half-opened window he could see a
patch of silk; a woman's back, bending slightly forward over the music.

As Rafael came up a dog began to bark at the end of the garden. Some
hens that had been scratching about in sand of the drive, scampered off
cackling with fright. The music stopped. A chair scraped as it was
pushed back. The lady was rising to her feet.

At the balcony a flowing gown of blue appeared; but all that Rafael saw
was a pair of eyes--green eyes, that seemed to fill the entire window
with a flood of light.

"Beppa! Beppina!" cried a firm, a warm, a sonorous, soprano voice.
"_Apri la porta_. Open the door."

And with a slight inclination of her splendid head of thick auburn hair
that seemed to crown her with a helmet of old gold, she smiled to him
with a friendly, somewhat mocking, intimacy:

"Welcome, Rafaelito. I don't know why, but I was expecting you this
afternoon. We have heard all about your triumphs; the music and the
tumult reached even to our desert. My congratulations to the Honorable
don Rafael Brull. Come right in, I _su senoria_."

II

From Valencia to Jativa, in all that immense territory covered with
rice-fields and orange groves