de 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?"

Rafael thought he did. As he went back in his memory, the picture of an
old wrinkled woman rose before his mind, a woman round-shouldered, bent
with age, but with a kindly face smiling with simple-mindedness and good
nature. He could see her now, with a rosary usually in her hand, a
camp-stool under her arm, and her _mantilla_ drawn down over her face.
As she passed the Brull door on her way to church, she would greet his
mother; and dona Bernarda would remark in a patronizing way: "Dona Pepa
is a very fine woman; one of God's own souls.... The only decent person
in her family."

"Yes; I remember; I remember dona Pepa," said Rafael.

"Well, your 'foreigner,'" don Andres continued, "is dona Pepa's niece,
daughter of her brother, the doctor. The girl has been all over the
world singing grand opera. You were probably too young to remember
Doctor Moreno, who was the scandal of the province in those days...."

But Rafael certainly did remember Doctor Moreno! That name was one of
the freshest of his childhood recollections, the bugaboo of many nights
of terror and alarm, when he would hide his trembling head under the
clothes. If he cried about going to bed so early, his mother would say