writhe in the torment of passion, indifferently.... But
though this persecution from a scandalized public was bad enough, she
did not mind it. Why should she care what those stupid people said? But,
alas, there were others--the people around Rafael, his friends, his
family, ... his mother!

Leonora sat silent for a moment, as if waiting to see the effect of that
last word; unless, indeed, she were hesitating, out of delicacy, to
include her lover's family in her complaint. The young man shrank with a
terrible presentiment. Dona Bernarda was not the woman to stand by idle
and resigned in the face of opposition, even from him!

"I see ... mother!" he said in a stifled voice. "She has been up to
something. Tell me what it is. Don't be afraid. To me you are dearer
than anything else in the world."

"Well ... there is auntie ..." Leonora resumed; and Rafael remembered
that dona Pepa, remarking his assiduous visits to the Blue House, had
thought her niece might be contemplating marriage. In the afternoon,
Leonora explained, she had had a _scene_ with her aunt. Dona Pepa had
gone into town to confession, and on coming out of church had met dona
Bernarda. Poor old woman! Her abject terror on returning home betrayed
the intense emotion Rafael's mother had succeeded in wakening in her.
Leonora, her niece, her idol, lay in the dust, stripped of that blind,
enthusiastic, affectionate trust her aunt had always had for her. All
the gossip, all the echoes of Leonora's adventurous life, that
had--heretofore but feebly--come to her ears, the old lady had never
believed, regarding them as the work of envy. But now they had been
repeated to her by dona Bernarda, by a lady "in good standing," a good
Christian, a person incapable of falsehood. And then after rehearsing
that scandalous biography, Rafael's mother had come to the shocking
effrontery with which her niece and Rafael were rousing the whole city;
flaunting their wrong-doing in the face of the public; and turning her
home, the respectable, irreproachable home of dona Pepa, into a den of
vice, a brothel!

And the poor woman had wept like a child in her niece's presence,
adjuring her to "abandon the wicked path of transgression," shuddering
with horror at the great responsibility she, dona Pepa, had unwittingly
assumed before God. All her life she had labored and prayed and fasted
to keep her soul clean. She had thought herself almost in a state of
grace, only to awaken suddenly