“A jewel for the home!  And didn’t I tell you so?” her father would whisper, satisfied with his daughter’s obtrusive qualities.

Rafael, for his part, found them intolerable.  He had tried to love his bride in the early months of their marriage.  He made an honest effort to forget, and recall the playful, passionate impulses he had felt on those days when he had chased her around the orchards.  But after a first fever of passion had passed, she had proved to be a cold, calculating child-bearer, hostile to expansiveness of love out of religious scruples, viewing it her duty to bring new offsprings into the world to perpetuate the House of Brull and to fill “grandaddy” don Matias with pride at sight of a nursery full of future “personages” destined to the heights of political greatness in the District and in the nation.

Rafael had one of those gentle, temperate, honest, households that, on the afternoon of their walk through Valencia, don Andres had pointed out to him as a radiant hope, if only he would turn his back on his mad adventure.  He had a wife; and he had children; and he was rich.  His father-in-law ordered shotguns for him from his correspondents in England.  Every year a new horse was added to the stable, and don Matias would see to purchasing the best that could be found in the fairs of Andalusia.  He hunted, took long horseback rides over the roads of the district, dispensed justice in the patio of the house, just as his father don Ramon had done.  His three little ones, finding him somewhat strange after his long absences in Madrid and more at home with their grand-parents than with him, would group themselves with bowed, bashful heads around his knees, silently waiting for his paternal kiss.  Everything attainable around him was within his reach for the asking; and yet—­he was not happy.

From time to time the adventure of his youth would come back to his mind.  The eight years that had passed seemed to have put a century between him and those ancient days.  Leonora’s face had slowly, slowly, faded in his memory, till all he could remember were her two green eyes, and her blond hair that crowned her with a crown of gold.  Her aunt, the devout, ingenuous dona Pepa, had died some time since—­leaving her property for the salvation of her soul.  The orchard and the Blue House belonged now to Rafael’s father-in-law, who had transferred to his own home the best of its equipment—­all the furniture and decorations that Leonora had bought during her period of exile, while Rafael had been in Madrid and she had thought of living the rest of her life in Alcira.

Rafael carefully avoided revisiting the Blue House, out of regard for his wife’s possible susceptibilities.  As it was, the woman’s silence sometimes weighed heavily upon him, a strange circumspection, which never permitted the slightest allusion to the past.  In the coldness and the uncompromising scorn with which she abominated any poetic madness in love, an important part was doubtless played by the suppressed memory of her husband’s adventure with the actress, which everybody had tried to conceal from her and which had deeply disturbed the preparations for her wedding.