For more than a fortnight the idle tongues of Leon found food for gossip in the strange circumstance of Lucía Gonzalez’s arrival alone, sad and deteriorated in looks, at her father’s home. The wildest stories were invented to explain the mystery of her return, the seclusion in which she chose to live, the heavy cloud of gloom that rested constantly on the countenance of Uncle Joaquin Gonzalez, the disappearance of the husband, and the innumerable other things which hinted at scandal or domestic infelicity. As usually happens in similar cases, a few grains of truth were mixed up with a great deal of fiction, and some of what was said was not without a semblance of reason; but for want of the necessary data wherewith to complete and elucidate the known facts of the story, public opinion groped about blindly for a time and at last went altogether astray. As may be inferred, however, the scandalmongers performed their part with diligence and zeal, some criticising the mature dandy who had wanted to marry a young wife; some the vain and foolish father who had sacrificed his daughter’s happiness to his wish to make her a lady; some the crazy girl who—— In short, they tacked on so many morals to Lucía’s story, that I may well be excused from adding another. What was most severely criticized, however, was the modern fashion of the wedding trip, a foreign and reprehensible innovation, calculated only to give rise to disgusts and annoyances of all kinds. I suspect that, warned by Lucía’s sad example, handed down by tradition, and repeated in turn to all the marriageable girls of the place, that for a century to come not a Leonese bride will be found willing to stir an inch from the domestic hearth, at least during the first ten years of her married life.
THE END.