ble seclusion his adorable cousin
was rather the helpless victim than the free and willing agent, induced
him to control himself and to wait. Had it not been for this suspicion
he would have left Orbajosa that very day. He had no doubt whatever that
Rosario loved him, but it was evident that some unknown influence was
at work to separate them, and it seemed to him to be the part of an
honorable man to discover whence that malign influence proceeded and to
oppose it, as far as it was in his power to do so.

"I hope that Rosarito's obstinacy will not continue long," he said to
Dona Perfecta, disguising his real sentiments.

On this day he received a letter from his father in which the latter
complained of having received none from Orbajosa, a circumstance which
increased the engineer's disquietude, perplexing him still further.
Finally, after wandering about alone in the garden for a long time, he
left the house and went to the Casino. He entered it with the desperate
air of a man about to throw himself into the sea.

In the principal rooms he found various people talking and discussing
different subjects. In one group they were solving with subtle logic
difficult problems relating to bulls; in another, they were discussing
the relative merits of different breeds of donkeys of Orbajosa and
Villahorrenda. Bored to the last degree, Pepe Rey turned away from these
discussions and directed his steps toward the reading-room, where he
looked through various reviews without finding any distraction in the
reading, and a little later, passing from room to room, he stopped,
without knowing why, at the gaming-table. For nearly two hours he
remained in the clutches of the horrible yellow demon, whose shining
eyes of gold at once torture and charm. But not even the excitement of
play had power to lighten the gloom of his soul, and the same tedium
which had impelled him toward the green cloth sent him away from
it. Shunning the noise, he found himself in an apartment used as an
assembly-room, in which at the time there was not a living soul, and
here he seated himself wearily at a window overlooking the street.

This was very narrow, with more corners and salient angles than houses,
and was overshaded throughout its whole extent by the imposing mass of
the cathedral that lifted its dark and time-corroded walls at one end
of it. Pepe Rey looked up and down and in every direction; no sign
of life--not a footstep, not a voice, not a gl