"Very well," the girl replied, in bad humor. "Are they sitting down?"
"Yes, señorita."
"Then they can wait without hurting them any."
But in a few minutes the pull at the bell was repeated with more violence, and the girl, foreseeing her mother's vexation, arose with a very bad grace, and dropping her sewing, exclaimed with a scornful accent:—
"There now, we are going to see Don Alfonso, Prince of Asturias!"
Don Alfonso was a man of about thirty-five, a gay bachelor, with regular features, with shaven cheeks, and mustaches twisted in the French style; in his wavy, black hair gleamed here and there a thread of silver; otherwise, his fresh and ruddy cheeks, his white and carefully brushed teeth, and his easy, graceful gestures, made him seem like a boy; his travelling-costume was affectedly elegant, with certain Parisian refinements unknown in Madrid. Julita took all this in at one rapid glance. He was not at all the man that she expected to meet. Having heard her cousin spoken of as a spendthrift, she had always imagined him as jaundiced, lean, scrubby, and inflicted with a cough, like some hair-brained Madrileños whom she knew by sight.
When he saw the young lady, he arose hastily to his feet.
"Oh, what a pretty cousin!" he exclaimed, at the same time taking her hand in a frank and affectionate manner. "You will forgive me for having disturbed you in what you were doing, will you not?"
"I was not doing anything.... Won't you sit down, sir?"
Don Alfonso remained a moment in a state of uncertainty, and then as he sat down, he exclaimed with a gesture of resignation:—