And as if this hymn to enlightening Christianity, chanted by an orator who could now hardly see across the gloomy hall, had been a signal, the electric lights went on; and the statues, the escutcheons, and the harsh, blatant figures painted on the cupola, sprang forth from obscurity.

Rafael could hardly contain his joy at the facility with which his speech was developing.  That wave of light which was shed over the hall, in the middle of the afternoon, while the sun was still shining, seemed to him like the sudden entrance of Glory, approaching to give him the accolade of renown.

Caught up now in the real torrent of his premeditated verbosity, he continued to relieve himself of all that he had learned by cramming during the past few days.  “In vain does su senoria fatigue his wits.  Spain is and will remain a profoundly religious country.  Her history is the history of Catholicism:  she has survived in all her times of storm and stress by tightly embracing the Cross.”  And he could now come to the national wars; from the battles in which popular piety saw Saint James, on his white steed, lopping off the heads of the Moors with his golden cutlass, to the uprising of the people against Napoleon, behind the banner of the parish and with their scapularies on their bosoms.  He did not have a word to say about the present.  He left the pitiless criticism of the old revolutionist intact.  Why not?  The dream of an ideologue!  He was absorbed in his song of the past, affirming for the hundredth time that Spain had been great because she had been Catholic and that when for a moment she had ceased to be Catholic, all the evils of the world had descended upon her.  He spoke of the excesses of the Revolution, of the turbulent Republic of ’73, (a cruel nightmare to all right-thinking persons) and of the “canton” of Cartagena (the supreme recourse of ministerial oratory),—­a veritable cannibal feast, a horror that had never been known even in this land of pronunciamientos and civil wars.  He tried his best to make his hearers feel the terror of those revolutions, whose chief defect had been that they had revolutionized nothing....  And then came a panegyric on the Christian family, on the Catholic home, a nest of virtues and blessings, whereas in nations where Catholicism did not reign all homes were repulsive brothels or horrible bandit caves.

“Fine, Brull, very good,” grunted the minister, his elbows stretched forward over his desk, delighted to hear his own ideas echoing from the young man’s mouth.

The orator rested for a moment, with his glance sweeping the galleries now bright with the electric lighting.  The woman in the diplomatic section had stopped fanning herself.  She was following him closely.  Her eyes met his.

Of a sudden Rafael nearly fell to his seat.  Those eyes!...  Perhaps an astonishing resemblance!  But no; it was she—­she was smiling to him with that same jesting, mocking smile of their earlier acquaintance!