Perfecta’s gratitude was so profound that in writing to her brother from Orbajosa, where she determined to reside until her daughter should be grown up, she said to him, among other affectionate things:  “You have been more than a brother to me, more than a father to my daughter.  How can either of us ever repay you for services so great?  Ah, my dear brother? from the moment in which my daughter can reason and pronounce a name I will teach her to bless yours.  My gratitude will end only with my life.  Your unworthy sister regrets only that she can find no opportunity of showing you how much she loves you and of recompensing you in a manner suited to the greatness of your soul and the boundless goodness of your heart.”

At the same time when these words were written Rosarito was two years old.  Pepe Rey, shut up in a school in Seville, was making lines on paper, occupied in proving that “the sum of all the interior angles of any polygon is equal to twice as many right angles, wanting four, as the figure has sides.”  These vexatious commonplaces of the school kept him very busy.  Year after year passed.  The boy grew up, still continuing to make lines.  At last, he made one which is called “From Tarragona to Montblanch.”  His first serious toy was the bridge, 120 metres in length, over the River Francoli.

During all this time Dona Perfecta continued to live in Orbajosa.  As her brother never left Seville, several years passed without their seeing each other.  A quarterly letter, as punctually written as it was punctually answered, kept in communication these two hearts, whose affection neither time nor distance could cool.  In 1870, when Don Juan Rey, satisfied with having fulfilled his mission in society, retired from it and went to live in his fine house in Puerto Real, Pepe, who had been employed for several years in the works of various rich building companies, set out on a tour through Germany and England, for the purpose of study.  His father’s fortune, (as large as it is possible for a fortune which has only an honorable law-office for its source to be in Spain), permitted him to free himself in a short time from the yoke of material labor.  A man of exalted ideas and with an ardent love for science, he found his purest enjoyment in the observation and study of the marvels by means of which the genius of the age furthers at the same time the culture and material comfort and the moral progress of man.

On returning from his tour his father informed him that he had an important project to communicate to him.  Pepe supposed that it concerned some bridge, dockyard, or, at the least, the draining of some marsh, but Don Juan soon dispelled his error, disclosing to him his plan in the following words: