h quickness of her body had
vanished. There was a melancholy abandonment, heavy with remorse, in her
sad and flabby face, in the humility of her look, in the slow, round
fatness of her whole body.

The ex-convict followed the advice of Don Adolfo and gave up all idea of
devoting himself to farming. In the best street of the village, near the
church, he set up a general repair-shop where he took in both wood and
iron work. There he shod a mule, mended a cart or put a new coulter to a
plow, with equal facility.

He had not been established long when his modest little business began
to pick up and be a real money-maker. Very soon his customers increased.
The disquieting story of his imprisonment seemed forgotten. Everybody
liked him, for he was good, affable and pleasant, in a melancholy way.
He paid his little debts promptly, and worked hard.

Zureda felt life once more grow calm. Slowly his future, which till then
had looked stormy, commenced to appear a land of hospitality,
comfortable and good. The threat of to-morrow, which makes so many men
uneasy, had ceased to be a problem for him. His future was already
founded, laid out, foreseen. The fifteen or twenty years that still
might remain to him, he hoped to pass in the loving accumulation of a
little fortune to leave his Rafaela.

He got up with the sun and worked industriously all day, driven by this
ambition. In the evening he took a dog that Don Adolfo had given him,
and went wandering in the outskirts of the village. One of his favorite
walks was out to the cemetery. He often pushed open the old gate, which
never was quite closed, and in the burial-ground sat himself down upon a
broken mill-stone which happened to be there. Seated thus, he liked to
smoke a cigarette.

Many crosses were blackening with age, in the tall grass that covered
the earth. The old man often called up memories of the time when he had
been an engineer. He remembered the prison, too, and his tired will
seemed to tremble. Peacefully he looked about him. Here, sometime, would
be his bed. What rest, what silence! And he breathed deep, enthralled by
the rare and calming joy of willingness to die. Here inside the old wall
of mud bricks, reddened by the setting sun--here in this garden of
forgetfulness--how well one ought to sleep!

Only one trouble disturbed and embittered the peaceful decline of Amadeo
Zureda. This trouble was his son, Manolo. Through an excess of fatherly
love, doubtless m