best informed.  If the elections took place on the date indicated by the newspapers, Rafael would still be five or six months short of his twenty-fifth birth-day.  But don Andres had written to Madrid to consult the Party leaders.  The prime minister was agreeable—­“there were precedents!”—­and even though Rafael should be a few weeks short of the legal age, the seat would go to him just the same.  They would send no more “foundlings” from Madrid!  Alcira would have no more “unknowns” foisted upon her!  And the whole Tribe of Brull dependents was preparing for the contest with the enthusiasm of a prize-fighter sure of victory beforehand.

All this bustling expectation left Rafael cold.  For years he had been looking forward to that election time, when the chance would come for his free life in Madrid.  Now that it was at hand he was completely indifferent to the whole matter, as if he were the last person in the world concerned.

He looked impatiently at the table where don Andres, with three other leading citizens, was having his daily hand at cards before coming to sit down at Rafael’s side.  That was a canny habit of don Andres.  He liked to be seen in his capacity of Regent, sheltering the heir-apparent under the wing of his prestige and experienced wisdom.

Well along in the afternoon, when the Club parlor was less crowded with members, the atmosphere freer of smoke, and the ivory balls less noisy on the green cloth, don Andres considered his game at an end, and took a chair in his disciple’s circle, where as usual Rafael was sitting with the most parasitic and adulatory of his partisans.

The boy pretended to be listening to their conversation, but all the while he was preparing mentally a question he had decided to put to don Andres the day before.

At last he made up his mind.

“You know everybody, don Andres.  Well, yesterday, up on San Salvador, I met a fine-looking woman who seems to be a foreigner.  She says she’s living here.  Who is she?”

The old man burst into a loud laugh, and pushed his chair back from the table, so that his big paunch would have room to shake in.

“So you’ve seen her, too!” he exclaimed between one guffaw and another.  “Well, sir, what a city this is!  That woman got in the day before yesterday, and everybody’s seen her already.  She’s the talk of the town.  You were the only one who hadn’t asked me about her so far.  And now you’ve bitten!...  Ho!  Ho!  Ho!  What a place this is!”

When he had had his laugh out—­Rafael, meanwhile, did not see the joke—­he continued in more measured style: 

“That ‘foreign woman,’ as you call her, boy, comes from Alcira.  In fact, she was born about two doors from you.  Don’t you know dona Pepa, ’the doctor’s woman,’ they call her—­a little lady who has an orchard close by the river and lives in the Blue House, that’s always under water when the Jucar floods?  She once owned the place you have just beyond where you live, and she’s the one who sold it to your father—­the only property don Ramon ever bought, so far as I know.  Don’t you remember?”