Go back to her?  Never!  He still felt the shame, the humiliation of that morning.  He could see himself in all his tragic ridiculousness, in a heap on the ground, trampled under foot by that Amazon, covered with dirt, as humble and abashed as a criminal caught redhanded and with no excuse.  And then that word, that had cut like the lash of a whip:  “Go!” As if he were a lackey who had dared approach a Duchess!  And then that gate slamming behind him, falling like a slab over a tomb, setting up an eternal barrier between him and the love of his life!

No, he would never go back!  He was not brave enough to face her again.  That morning when he had met her by chance near the market-place, he thought he would die of shame; his legs sagged under him, and the street turned black as if night had suddenly fallen.  She had disappeared; but there was a ringing in his ears; and he had had to take hold of something, as if the earth were swaying under his feet, and he would fall.

He needed to forget that unutterable disgrace—­a recollection as tenacious as remorse itself.  That was why he had plunged into the affair with his mother’s protegee—­as a sort of anaesthetic.  She was a woman!  And his hands, which seemed to have been unbound since that painful morning, went out toward her; his tongue, free after his vehement confession of love at the orchard-gate, spoke glibly now expressing an adoration that seemed to go beyond the inexpressive features of Remedios, and reach far, far away, to the Blue House, where the other woman was, offended and in hiding.

With Remedios he would feel some sign of life, only to relapse into torpid gloom the moment he was left alone.  It was a foamy, frothy intoxication he felt when with the girl, an effervescence that all evaporated in solitude.  He thought of Remedios as a piece of green fruit—­sound, free of cut or stain, and with all the color of maturity, but lacking the taste that satisfies and the perfume that enthralls.

In his strange situation, spending days in childish games with a young girl who aroused in him nothing more than the bland sense of fraternal comradeship, and nights in sad and sleepless recollection, the one thing that pleased him was intimacy with his mother.  Peace had been restored to the home.  He could come and go without being conscious of a pair of eyes glaring upon him and without hearing words of indignation stifled between grating teeth.

Don Andres and his friends at the Club kept asking him when the wedding would take place.  In presence of “the children” dona Bernarda would speak of alterations that would have to be made in the house.  She and the servants would occupy the ground floor.  The whole first story would be for the couple, with new rooms that would be the talk of the city—­they would get the best decorators in Valencia!  Don Matias treated him familiarly, just as he had in the old days when he came to the patio to get his orders from don Ramon and found Rafael, as a child, playing at his father’s feet.