but, after all, for wood to perspire--well,
then, the best thing is to make offerings to both."

A carriage stopping before the house cut short the
conversation. Captain Tiago, followed by Aunt Isabel, ran down the
steps to receive the coming guests. They were the doctor, Don Tiburcio
de Espadana, his wife, the Doctora Dona Victorina de Los Reyes de de
Espadana, and a young Spaniard of attractive face and fine appearance.

The doctora wore a silk dress bordered with flowers, and a hat with a
large parrot perched among bows of red and blue ribbons. The dust of
the journey mingling with the rice powder on her cheeks, exaggerated
her wrinkles; as when we saw her at Manila, she had given her arm to
her lame husband.

"I have the pleasure of presenting to you our cousin, Don Alfonso
Linares de Espadana," said Dona Victorina, indicating the young man;
"the adopted son of a relative of Father Damaso's, and private
secretary of all the ministers----"

The young man bowed low; Captain Tiago barely escaped kissing his hand.

While the countless trunks, valises, and bags are being cared for and
Captain Tiago is conducting his guests to their apartments, let us
make a nearer acquaintance with these people whom we have not seen
since the opening chapters.

Dona Victorina is a woman of forty-five summers, which, according to
her arithmetic, are equivalent to thirty-two springs. In her youth she
had been very pretty, but, enraptured in her own contemplation, she
had looked with the utmost disdain on her numerous Filipino adorers,
even scorning the vows of love once murmured in her ears or chanted
under her balcony by Captain Tiago. Her aspirations bore her toward
another race.

Her first youth, then her second, then her third, having passed in
tending nets to catch in the ocean of the world the object of her
dreams, Dona Victorina must in the end content herself with what fate
willed her. It was a poor man torn from his native Estramadure, who,
after wandering six or seven years about the world, a modern Ulysses,
found at length, in the island of Luzon, hospitality, money, and a
faded Calypso.

Don Tiburcio was a modest man, without force, who would not willingly
have injured a fly. He started for the Philippines as under-clerk
of customs, but after breaking his leg was forced to give up his
position. For a while he lived at the expense of some compatriots,
but he found their bread bitter. As he had neither profession nor
m