“I see ... mother!” he said in a stifled voice.  “She has been up to something.  Tell me what it is.  Don’t be afraid.  To me you are dearer than anything else in the world.”

“Well ... there is auntie ...”  Leonora resumed; and Rafael remembered that dona Pepa, remarking his assiduous visits to the Blue House, had thought her niece might be contemplating marriage.  In the afternoon, Leonora explained, she had had a scene with her aunt.  Dona Pepa had gone into town to confession, and on coming out of church had met dona Bernarda.  Poor old woman!  Her abject terror on returning home betrayed the intense emotion Rafael’s mother had succeeded in wakening in her.  Leonora, her niece, her idol, lay in the dust, stripped of that blind, enthusiastic, affectionate trust her aunt had always had for her.  All the gossip, all the echoes of Leonora’s adventurous life, that had—­heretofore but feebly—­come to her ears, the old lady had never believed, regarding them as the work of envy.  But now they had been repeated to her by dona Bernarda, by a lady “in good standing,” a good Christian, a person incapable of falsehood.  And then after rehearsing that scandalous biography, Rafael’s mother had come to the shocking effrontery with which her niece and Rafael were rousing the whole city; flaunting their wrong-doing in the face of the public; and turning her home, the respectable, irreproachable home of dona Pepa, into a den of vice, a brothel!

And the poor woman had wept like a child in her niece’s presence, adjuring her to “abandon the wicked path of transgression,” shuddering with horror at the great responsibility she, dona Pepa, had unwittingly assumed before God.  All her life she had labored and prayed and fasted to keep her soul clean.  She had thought herself almost in a state of grace, only to awaken suddenly and find herself in the very midst of sin through no fault of her own—­all on account of her niece, who had converted her holy, her pure, her pious home into an ante-chamber of hell!  And it was the poor woman’s superstitious terror, the conviction of damnation that had seized on dona Pepa’s simple soul, that wounded Leonora most deeply.

“They’ve robbed me of all I had in the world,” she murmured desperately, “of the affection of the only dear one left after my father died.  I am not the child of former days to auntie; that is apparent from the way she looks at me, the way she shuns me, avoiding all contact with me....  And just because of you, because I love you, because I was not cruel to you!  Oh, that night!  How I shall suffer for it!...  How clearly I foresaw how it would all end!”

Rafael was humiliated, crushed, filled with shame and remorse at the suffering that had fallen upon this woman, because she had given herself to him.  What was he to do?  The time had come to prove himself the strong, the resourceful man, able to protect the beloved woman in her moment of danger.  But where should he strike first to defend her?...