"In view of the little widow's conduct I imagine that you must have invented all that about the window and the precipice; you must have told it to me to fool me or, as you are so imaginative, you dreamed that it happened and you took the dream for reality."—He does well to mock me.—"At all events, my boy, if you were interested in the widow, think no more about her. I know to a certainty, through my cousins, who have it for a fact from their father, that at the expiration of the period of her mourning she is to marry a certain Marquis de Cameros who represented at one time a district in Lugo."—Yes, yes, I understand.—"The thing is serious, for, according to what my cousins say, the house linen is being embroidered already with the coronet of a marchioness."
The letter was torn still more slowly and into still smaller pieces than the newspapers. With the fragments Segundo made a ball which he threw far into the middle of the pool. "Such is love," he said to himself, laughing bitterly.
He began to walk up and down the room, at first with a certain monotonous regularity, then restlessly and with fury. Clara, the eldest of his sisters, half opened the door of the room, saying:
"Aunt Gáspara says you are to come."
"What for?"
"Dinner is ready."
Segundo took his hat and rushing into the street walked toward the river, filled with that species of fury which one who has just received some mental shock, some bitter disappointment, is apt to feel at being called on to take part in any of the ordinary concerns of life.