She referred with acrid mirth one night to what people were saying about them.  Everything was found out sooner or later in that city!  The gossip had gotten even to the Blue House!  Her kitchen woman had hinted that she had better not walk so much along the river front—­she might catch malaria.  On the market place the sole topic of conversation was that night trip down the Jucar ... the deputy, sweating his life out over the oars, and she waking half the country up with her strange songs!...  And she laughed, but with a hard, harsh laugh of affected gaiety that showed the nervousness underneath, though without a word of complaint.

Rafael remorsefully reflected that she had foreseen all that in first repelling his advances.  He admired her resignation.  She would have been justified in rebuking him for the harm he had done her.  As it was, she was not even telling him all she knew!  Ah, the wretches!  To harass an innocent woman so!  She had loved him, given herself to him, bestowed on him the royal gift of her person.  And the deputy began to hate his city, for repaying in insult and scandal the wondrous happiness she had conferred on its “chief”!

On another night Leonora received him with a smile that frightened him.  She was affecting a mood of hectic cheerfulness, trying to drown her worries by sheer force, overwhelming her lover with a flood of light, frivolous chatter; but suddenly, at the limit of her endurance, she gave way, and in the middle of a caress, burst into tears and sank to a divan, sobbing as if her heart would break.

“Why what’s the matter?  What has happened ...?”

For a time she could not answer, her voice was too choked with weeping.  At last, however, between sobs, burying her tear-stained face on Rafael’s shoulder, she began to speak, completely crushed, fainting from virtual prostration.

She could stand it no longer!  The torture was becoming unbearable.  It was useless for her to pretend.  She knew as well as he what people were saying in the city.  They were spied upon continuously.  On the roads, in the orchard, along the river, there were people constantly on the watch for something new to report.  That passion of hers, so sweet, so youthful, so sincere, was a butt of public laughter, a theme for idle tongues, who flayed her as if she were a common street-woman, because she had been good to him, because she had not been cruel enough to watch a young man 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!