It had been one of her caprices—­a desire repeated during his visits to the Blue House on some afternoons, in the presence of dona Pepa and the maid, and on every night, as he passed through the opening in the hedge where Leonora’s bare arms were waiting for him in the darkness.

For more than a week Rafael had been living in a sweet dream.  Never had he imagined that life could be so beautiful.  It was a mood of delicious abstraction.  The city no longer existed for him.  The people that moved about him seemed like so many spectres:  his mother and Remedios were invisible beings.  Their words he would hear and answer without taking the trouble to look up.

He spent his days in feverish impatience for night to come—­that the family might finish supper and leave him free to go to his room, whence he would cautiously tip-toe, as soon as the house was silent and everybody was asleep.

Indifferent to everything foreign to his love, he did not realize the effect his conduct was having on his mother.  She had noticed that his door was locked all morning while he slept off the fatigue of a sleepless night.  She had already tired of asking him whether he was ill, and of getting the same reply: 

“No, mama; I’ve been working nights; an important study I’m preparing.”

It was all his mother could do on such occasions to restrain herself from shouting “Liar!” Two nights she had gone up to his room, to find the door locked and the keyhole dark.  Her son was not inside.  She would lie awake for him now; and every morning, somewhat before dawn, she would hear him softly open the outside door and tip-toe up the stairs, perhaps in his stocking-feet.

The female Spartan said nothing however, hoarding her indignation in silence, complaining only to don Andres of the recrudescence of a madness that was upsetting all her plans.  Through his numerous henchmen the counselor kept watch upon the young man.  His spies followed Rafael cautiously through the night, up to the gate of the Blue House.

“What a scandal!” exclaimed dona Bernarda.  “At night, too!  He’ll wind up by bringing her into this house!  Can it be that that simpleton of a dona Pepita is blind to all this?”

And there was Rafael, unaware of the storm that was gathering about his head, no longer deigning even to speak to Remedios, or look at her, as with her head bowed like a sulky goat, she went around stifling her tears at the memory of those happy strolls in the orchard under dona Bernarda’s surveillance.

The deputy had eyes for nothing outside of the Blue House; his happiness had blinded him.  The one thing that annoyed him was the necessity of hiding his joy—­his inability to make his good fortune public, so that all his admirers might learn of it.

He would willingly have gone back to the days of the Roman decadence, when the love affairs of the powerful became matters of national adoration.