“Everything I have will be for you two.  Remedios is an angel, and the day I die, she will get more than my rascal of a son.  All I ask of you is not to take her off to Madrid.  Since she is leaving my roof, at least let me be able to see her every day.”

And Rafael would listen to all these things as in a dream.  In reality he had not expressed the slightest desire to marry; but there was his mother, taking everything for granted, arranging everything, imposing her will, accelerating his sluggish affection, literally forcing Remedios into his arms!  His wedding was a foregone conclusion, the topic of conversation for the entire city.

Sunk in this sadness, in the clutch of the tranquillity which now surrounded him and which he was afraid to break; weak, as a matter of character, and without will power, he sought consolation in the reflection that the solution his mother was preparing was perhaps for the best.

His friendship with Leonora had been broken forever.  Any day she might take flight!  She had said so very often.  She would be going very soon—­when the blossoms were off the orange-trees!  What would be left for him then ... except to obey his mother?  He would marry, and perhaps that would serve as a distraction.  Little by little his affection for Remedios might grow.  Perhaps in time he would even come to love her.

Such meditations brought him a little calm, lulling him into an attitude of agreeable irresponsibility.  He would turn child again, as he once had been, have his mother take charge of everything; let himself be drawn along, passive, unresisting, by the current of destiny.

But at times this resignation boiled up into hot, seething ebullitions of angry protest, of raging passion.  At night Rafael could not sleep.  The orange-trees were beginning to bloom.  The blossoms, like an odorous snow, covered the orchards and shed their perfume as far even as the city streets.  The air was heavy with fragrance.  To breathe was to scent a nosegay.  Through the window-gratings under the doors, through the walls, the virginal perfume of the vast orchards filtered—­an intoxicating breath, that Rafael, in his impassioned restlessness, imagined as wafted from the Blue House, caressing Leonora’s lovely figure, and catching something of the divine fragrance of her redolent beauty.  And he would roll furiously between the sheets, biting the pillow and moaning.

“Leonora!  Leonora!”

One night, toward the end of April, Rafael drew back in front of the door to his room, with the tremor he would have felt on the threshold of a place of horror.  He could not endure the thought of the night that awaited him.  The whole city seemed to have sunk into languor, in that atmosphere so heavily charged with perfume.  The lash of spring was stirring all the impulses of life with its exciting caress, and goading every feeling to new intensity.  Not the slightest breeze was blowing.  The orchards saturated the calm atmosphere with their odorous respiration.  The lungs expanded as if there were no air, and all space were being inhaled in each single breath.  A voluptuous shudder was stirring the countryside as it lay dozing under the light of the moon.