would gladly have given his future deputyship and all the
orchards he had inherited, which, though encumbered by mortgages not to
mention moral debts left by the rascality of his father and
grandfather--still would bring him a tidy annuity for realizing his
bohemian dreams.

Such preoccupations made life as a party leader, tied down to the petty
interests of a constituency, quite unthinkable! At the risk of angering
his mother, he fled the Club, to court the solitude of the hills and
fields. There his imagination could range in greater freedom, peopling
the roads, the meadows, the orange groves with creatures of his fancy,
often conversing aloud with the heroines of some "grand passion,"
carried on along the lines laid down by the latest novel he had read.

One afternoon toward the close of summer Rafael climbed the little
mountain of San Salvador, which lies close to the city. From the
eminence he was fond of looking out over the vast domains of his family.
For all the inhabitants of that fertile plain were--as don Andres said
whenever he wished to emphasize the party's greatness--like so many
cattle branded with the name of Brull.

As he went up the winding, stony trail, Rafael thought of the mountains
of Assisi, which he had visited with his friend the canon, a great
admirer of the Saint of Umbria. It was a landscape that suggested
asceticism. Crags of bluish or reddish rock lined the roadway on either
side, with pines and cypresses rising from the hollows, and extending
black, winding, snaky roots out over the fallow soil. At intervals,
white shrines with tiny roofs harbored mosaics of glazed tiles depicting
the Stations on the _Via Dolorosa_. The pointed green caps of the
cypresses, as they waved, seemed bent on frightening away the white
butterflies that were fluttering about over the rosemary and the
nettles. The parasol-pines projected patches of shade across the burning
road, where the sun-baked earth crackled and crumbled to dead dust under
every footstep.

Reaching the little square in front of the Hermitage, he rested from the
ascent, stretching out full length on the crescent of rubblework that
formed a bench near the sanctuary. There silence reigned, the silence of
high hill-tops. From below, the noises of the restless life and labor of
the plain came weakened, softened, by the wind, like the murmuring of
waves breaking on a distant shore. Among the prickly-pears that grew in
close thicket behind the b