“I am truly sorry for the occurrence!” stammered Pepe Rey.  “It gives me real pain, although I had no part in it—­”

“Your visit to those Senoras Troyas will be talked about all over the town,” said the canon.  “We are not in Madrid, in that centre of corruption, of scandal—­”

“There you can visit the vilest places without any one knowing it,” said Dona Perfecta.

“Here we are very observant of one another,” continued Don Inocencio.  “We take notice of everything our neighbors do, and with such a system of vigilance public morals are maintained at a proper height.  Believe me, my friend, believe me,—­and I do not say this to mortify you,—­you are the first gentleman of your position who, in the light of day—­the first, yes, senor—­Trojoe qui primus ab oris.”

And bursting into a laugh, he clapped the engineer on the back in token of amity and good-will.

“How grateful I ought to be,” said the young man, concealing his anger under the sarcastic words which he thought the most suitable to answer the covert irony of his interlocutors, “to meet with so much generosity and tolerance, when my criminal conduct would deserve—­”

“What!  Is a person of one’s own blood, one who bears one’s name,” said Dona Perfecta, “to be treated like a stranger?  You are my nephew, you are the son of the best and the most virtuous of men, of my dear brother Juan, and that is sufficient.  Yesterday afternoon the secretary of the bishop came here to tell me that his lordship is greatly displeased because I have you in my house.”

“And that too?” murmured the canon.

“And that too.  I said that in spite of the respect which I owe the bishop, and the affection and reverence which I bear him, my nephew is my nephew, and I cannot turn him out of my house.”

“This is another singularity which I find in this place,” said Pepe Rey, pale with anger.  “Here, apparently, the bishop governs other people’s houses.”

“He is a saint.  He is so fond of me that he imagines—­he imagines that you are going to contaminate us with your atheism, your disregard for public opinion, your strange ideas.  I have told him repeatedly that, at bottom, you are an excellent young man.”

“Some concession must always be made to superior talent,” observed Don Inocencio.

“And this morning, when I was at the Cirujedas’—­oh, you cannot imagine in what a state they had my head!  Was it true that you had come to pull down the cathedral; that you were commissioned by the English Protestants to go preaching heresy throughout Spain; that you spent the whole night gambling in the Casino; that you were drunk in the streets?  ‘But, senoras,’ I said to them, ’would you have me send my nephew to the hotel?’ Besides, they are wrong about the drunkenness, and as for gambling—­I have never yet heard that you gambled.”