“And how do you get on?” Sebastião asked him, leaning forward with an air of interest.
Cunha smiled disconsolately, letting these words fall from his pallid lips,—
“I get on so fast that I shall soon be out of this.”
Sebastião coughed, unable to think of a single word of consolation.
The sick man stood still, resting both his hands on the head of his cane; suddenly his doll gaze brightened with interest.
“Tell me, Sebastião,” he said, “that good-looking young man that I see go into Jorge’s every day,—is he not Bazilio de Brito, the cousin of Jorge’s wife, the son of João de Brito?”
“Yes; why?”
“I was right! I was right! And that obstinate creature would persist in saying it was not so.”
He then proceeded to explain himself.
“My room looks out on the street, and as I am almost always sitting at the window, in order to divert my thoughts, I noticed this young man, dressed like a foreigner, entering there—every day. I said, ‘It is Bazilio de Brito.’ My wife insisted it was not. What the deuce! I was almost certain. I know him as well as I know anything. He looks just the same as when he was going to marry Donna Luiza. Oh, I have all that history at my fingers’ ends. She lived then in the street of the Magdalena.”