A little later, with dirty hands and clothes, his face bathed in perspiration, he rushed up to his mother with the result of his investigations.
"Here is something for you to see."
She was reading; she looked up and turned as white as a sheet.
"Is that the cement stone?" she asked, as she put down her book.
"Did you know about it?" he exclaimed, in the greatest astonishment.
"Good gracious, yes," she answered. She walked across to the window, came back again, pressing her hands together. "So you have found it too?"
"Who did before me?"
"Your father, Rafael, your father, the first time that I was here, a little time before we were to leave." She paused. "He came rushing in as you did just now—not so quickly, not so quickly, he was weak in the legs, but otherwise just like you." She let her eyes rest, with a peculiar look, on Rafael's dirty hands. The hands themselves were not well shaped, they were almost exactly his father's.
Rafael noticed nothing.
"Had HE found the bed of cement stone, then?"