Don Andres alone was successful in amusing the child, with his tales and his strolls through the orchards, picking flowers for him, making whistles for him out of reeds.  It was don Andres who took him to school, also, and who advertised the boy’s fondness for study everywhere.

If don Rafael were a serious, melancholy lad, that defect was chargeable to his interest in books, and at the Casino, the “Party’s” Club, he would say to his fellow-worshippers: 

“You’ll see something doing when Rafaelito grows up.  That kid is going to be another Canovas.”

And before all those rustic minds the vision of a Brull at the head of the Government would suddenly flash, filling the first page of the newspapers with speeches six columns long, and a To Be Continued at the end; and they could see themselves rolling in money and running all Spain, just as they now ran their District, to their own sweet wills.

Never did a Prince of Wales grow up amid the respect and the adulation heaped upon little Brull.  At school, the children regarded him as a superior being who had condescended to come down among them for his education.  A well-scribbled sheet, a lesson fluently repeated, were enough for the teacher, who belonged to “the Party” (just to collect his wages on time and without trouble,) to declare in prophetic tones: 

“Go on working like that, senor de Brull.  You are destined to great things.”

At the tertulias his mother attended evenings in his company, it was enough for him to recite a fable or get off some piece of learning characteristic of a studious child eager to bring his school work into the conversation, for the women to rush upon him and smother him with kisses.

“But how much that child knows!...  How brilliant he is!”

And some old woman would add, sententiously: 

“Bernarda, take good care of the child; don’t let him use his brain so much.  It’s bad for him.  See how peaked he looks!...”

He finished his preparatory education with the Dominicans, taking the leading role in all the plays given in the tiny theatre of the friars, and always with a place in the first line on prize days.  The Party organ dedicated an annual article to the scholastic prodigies of the “gifted son of our distinguished chief don Ramon Brull, the country’s hope, who already merits title as the shining light of the future!”

When Rafael, escorted by his mother and half a dozen women who had witnessed the exercises, would come home, gleaming with medals and his arms full of diplomas, he would stoop and kiss his father’s hard, bristly hand; and that claw would caress the boy’s head and absent-mindedly sink into the old man’s vest pocket—­for don Ramon expected to pay for all welcome favors.

“Very good,” the hoarse voice would murmur.  “That’s the way I like to see you do ...Here’s a duro.”

And not till the following year would the boy again know what a caress from his father meant.  On certain occasions, playing in the patio, he had surprised the austere old man gazing at him fixedly, as if trying to foresee his future.