has brought me...."

Maximina continued speechless. She looked like a statue of Desolation.

"I am going to tell you all, all! You will pardon me, will you not,
lovely Maximina?"

And the audacious _caballero_ pronounced these words with his
insinuating, mellow voice, at the same time gently laying the palm of
his hand on the back of Maximina's. She withdrew it as though she had
touched a vile animal; and leaping to her feet, as though pushed by a
spring, she ran to the door, and hastened into the parlor.

Don Alfonso followed her, and caught her by her arm. Then, pulling
herself away with remarkable power, she broke from his touch, but,
instead of running, she faced him with flaming cheeks, looking at him
with frenzied eyes that were frightful to see.

The truth is, that among the many attitudes which he had imagined that
Miguel's wife might assume, Saavedra had never thought of such an one.
He expected repulses, indignant phrases, even insulting words, and he
was prepared to meet them with a cold and careless mien; he expected to
be commanded to go on the instant, he expected the threat that she would
shout, and he was likewise prepared with what to say to calm her
immediately; finally, in the depths of his heart, his presumption
flattered him by saying that Maximina could not long resist his
attraction and his fame as a seducer. But these strange, inconvenient
flights, this mute terror, surprised and somewhat disconcerted him.

"What are you going to do, Maximina," he asked, though the poor child
was not doing anything; but it was well to warn her for some event.--"If
you should cry or call your servants, you would be seriously
compromised; there would be a scandal, everybody would know about it,
including your husband, and you would lose much more than you have any
idea of.... Come now, be reasonable," he added, in the same mellow voice
in which he had spoken before, and approaching her. "The thing is not
worth taking in this tragic fashion. It is not strange that I am
desperately in love with you, nor am I to blame for it, but the God who
made you so beautiful, so sweet, so _simpatica_.... And if you should
grant me one little favor--let me kiss one hand as a reward for so much
adoration, for so many sad and bitter hours which I have suffered during
the last month, I think it would not be very strange, either. It would
be on your part not a proof of love, which I know well I do not deserve,
but rather of you