al of Valencia, who could find
nothing to do but loiter night and day about the Gallery. Through him
Brull had learned of the life led by these journeymen of art, always on
hand in the "marketplace", waiting for the employer who never comes.

He tried to picture the early days of Leonora in that great city, as one
of the girls who trot gracefully over the sidewalks with music sheets
under their arms, or enliven the narrow side streets with all those
trills and cadences that come streaming out through the windows.

He could see her walking through the Gallery at Doctor Moreno's side: a
blonde beauty, svelte, somewhat thin, over-grown, taller than her years,
gazing with astonishment through those large green eyes of hers at the
cold, bustling city, so different from the warm orchards of her
childhood home; the father, bearded, wrinkled, nervous, still irritated
at the ruin of his Republican hopes; a veritable ogre to strangers who
did not know his lamb-like gentleness. Like exiles who had found a
refuge in art, they two went their way through that life of emptiness,
of void, a world of greedy teachers anxious to prolong the period of
study, and of singers incapable of speaking kindly even of themselves.

They lived on a fourth floor on the _Via Passarella_--a narrow, gloomy
thoroughfare with high houses, like the streets of old Alcira, preempted
by music publishers, theatrical agencies and retired artists. Their
janitor was a former chorus leader; the main floor was rented by an
agency exclusively engaged from sun to sun in testing voices. The others
were occupied by singers who began their vocal exercises the moment they
got out of bed, setting the house ringing like a huge music-box from
roof to cellar. The Doctor and his daughter had two rooms in the house
of _Signora Isabella_, a former ballet-dancer who had achieved notorious
"triumphs" in the principal courts of Europe, but was now a skeleton
wrapped in wrinkled skin, groping her way through the corridors,
quarreling over money in foul-mouthed language with the servants, and
with no other vestiges of her past than the gowns of rustling silk, and
the diamonds, emeralds and pearls that took their turns in her stiff,
shrivelled ears. This harpy had loved Leonora with the fondness of the
veteran for the new recruit.

Every day Doctor Moreno went to a cafe of the Gallery, where he would
meet a group of old musicians who had fought under Garibaldi, and young
men who wr