“Anyway, that will prove I wasn’t lying that day when I assured you I would not forget, in Madrid.  Well, Leonora; I didn’t!  The separation has made me worse, much worse, in fact.”

“Thanks, Rafael,” Leonora answered, quite seriously, as if she had lost mastery over the irony of former days.  “I know you’re telling the truth.  And it saddens me, because it really is too bad.  You understand, of course, that I can’t love you....  So—­if you don’t mind—­let’s talk of something else.”

And hastily, to shift the conversation from such dangerous ground, she began to chat about her rustic pleasures.

“I have a hen-coop that’s too charming for anything.  If you could only see me mornings, in a circle of cackling feathers, throwing fusillades of corn about to keep the roosters away.  You see they get under my skirts and peck at my feet.  It’s hard to realize I can be the same woman who, just a few months ago, was brandishing a stage lance and interpreting Wagner’s dreams, no less, as finely as you please!  You’ll soon see my vassals.  I have the most astonishing layers you ever saw; and every morning I rummage around in the straw like a thief to get the eggs, and when I find them, they are still warm....  I’ve forgotten the piano.  I hadn’t opened it for more than a week, but this afternoon—­I don’t know why—­I just felt like spending a little while in the society of the geniuses.  I was thirsty for music ... one of those moody whims of the olden days.  Perhaps the presentiment that you were coming:  the thought of those afternoons when you were upstairs, sitting like a booby in the corner, listening to me....  But don’t jump to the conclusion, my dear deputy, that everything here is mere play—­just chickens and the simple life.  No, sir!  I have turned my leisure to serious account.  I have done big things to the house.  You would never guess!  A bathroom, if you please!  And it just scandalizes poor auntie; while Beppa says it’s a sin to give so much thought to matters of the body.  I could give up many of my old habits, but not my bath; it’s the one luxury I have kept, and I sent to Valencia for the plumbers, the marble, and the wood and... well ... it’s a gem.  I’ll show it to you, by and by.  If some fine day I should suddenly take it into my head to fly away, that bath will remain here, for my poor aunt to preach about and show how her madcap niece squandered a mint of money on sinful folly, as she calls it.”

And she laughed, with a glance at the innocent dona Pepa, who, there on the other bench, was for the hundredth time explaining to the Italian maid the prodigious miracles wrought by the patron of Alcira, and trying to persuade the “foreigner” to transfer her faith to that saint, and waste no more time on the second or third raters of Italy.