“Ah, Senor Don Pepe! what a rogue you are!  So you have shut yourself in here to ogle the girls, eh?”

The speaker was Don Juan Tafetan, a very amiable man, and one of the few members of the Casino who had manifested for Pepe Rey cordial friendship and genuine admiration.  With his red cheeks, his little dyed mustache, his restless laughing eyes, his insignificant figure, his hair carefully combed to hide his baldness, Don Juan Tafetan was far from being an Antinous in appearance, but he was very witty and very agreeable and he had a happy gift for telling a good story.  He was much given to laughter, and when he laughed his face, from his forehead to his chin, became one mass of grotesque wrinkles.  In spite of these qualities, and of the applause which might have stimulated his taste for spicy jokes, he was not a scandal-monger.  Every one liked him, and Pepe Rey spent with him many pleasant hours.  Poor Tafetan, formerly an employe in the civil department of the government of the capital of the province, now lived modestly on his salary as a clerk in the bureau of charities; eking out his income by gallantly playing the clarionet in the processions, in the solemnities of the cathedral, and in the theatre, whenever some desperate company of players made their appearance in those parts with the perfidious design of giving representations in Orbajosa.

But the most curious thing about Don Juan Tafetan was his liking for pretty girls.  He himself, in the days when he did not hide his baldness with half a dozen hairs plastered down with pomade, when he did not dye his mustache, when, in the freedom from care of youthful years, he walked with shoulders unstooped and head erect, had been a formidable Tenorio.  To hear him recount his conquests was something to make one die laughing; for there are Tenorios and Tenorios, and he was one of the most original.

“What girls?  I don’t see any girls,” responded Pepe Rey.

“Yes, play the anchorite!”

One of the blinds of the balcony was opened, giving a glimpse of a youthful face, lovely and smiling, that disappeared instantly, like a light extinguished by the wind.

“Yes, I see now.”

“Don’t you know them?”

“On my life I do not.”

“They are the Troyas—­the Troya girls.  Then you don’t know something good.  Three lovely girls, the daughters of a colonel of staff, who died in the streets of Madrid in ’54.”

The blind opened again, and two faces appeared.

“They are laughing at me,” said Tafetan, making a friendly sign to the girls.

“Do you know them?”

“Why, of course I know them.  The poor things are in the greatest want.  I don’t know how they manage to live.  When Don Francisco Troya died a subscription was raised for them, but that did not last very long.”

“Poor girls!  I imagine they are not models of virtue.”

“And why not?  I do not believe what they say in the town about them.”