CHAPTER XXIV.
THREE AGAINST TWO.
The next evening, at the hour fixed by Don Pedro, Leon made his way to Pepa’s sitting-room. She was there with her father and a third person. Monina, who had been dancing and skipping round her mother, was condemned to retire to bed; a banishment involving floods of tears, but against which there is no appeal for the little ones when their elders have business to discuss. The marquis half-buried in a deep arm-chair, with his fat chin resting on his shirt front, his lips sticking out as if too much flesh had gone to the making of his face, his brows knit under a labyrinth of wrinkles—the scars, as it were, won in a hundred fights against “all exaggeration,” was an impressive personage. The third of the trio was an old man with white hair, a dry thin face, and excessively short-sighted, to judge from the strong concavity of his gold-mounted spectacles which were astride on a nose that, for size and curve, was more like a pelican’s bill than anything else in creation. His manners had the gravity of a student mixed with the patriarchal frankness of a man of good birth. They were all in mourning, and the grief of Pepa’s heart overflowed her eyes.
“Here he is,” said Don Pedro taking his daughter’s hand caressingly.
“So I see,” said Pepa looking up at Leon and then looking away. “And now he is to repeat what my father told me, and I would not believe.”
“My dearest child,” said Fúcar, “this is a case of honour, of duty, of social decency, of morality—both in the true and in the more customary sense. Consider.—You cannot have everything you want.”
“I know it, I know it,” murmured Pepa, fixing a stony gaze on the table-cloth before her.
“Much as it costs me,” said Leon feeling that brevity was most to the purpose. “I must declare that I see it to be an inexorable duty to part from the woman I love, and give up every hope of ever making her mine.”