Amparito laughed again and disappeared.
The first days of his engagement Cæsar was constantly in-tranquil and uneasy. He kept thinking that it was impossible to live like that, giving his whole attention to nothing except the desires of a girl. He imagined that the awakening would come from one moment to the next; but the awakening didn’t arrive.
By degrees Cæsar abandoned all the affairs of the district, which had taken all his attention, and took to occupying himself solely with his sweetheart. The whole town knew their relations and talked of the coming wedding.
That dazzling idyll intrigued all the girls in Castro. The truth was that none of them had considered Cæsar a marrying man; some had imagined him already old; others an experienced and vicious bachelor, incapable of yielding to the matrimonial yoke; and now they saw him a youth, of distinguished type, with distinguished manners and looks.
Cæsar went almost daily to Amparito’s father’s country-place. It was a magnificent estate, another ancient property of the Dukes of Castro Duro, with a house adorned with escutcheons, and an extensive stone pool, deep and mysterious. The garden did not resemble that at Don Calixto’s house, for that one was of a frantic gaiety, and the one on Amparito’s father’s estate was very melancholy. Above all, the square of water in the pool, whose edges were decorated with great granite vases, had a mysterious, sad aspect.
“Doesn’t it make you very sad to look at this deep water in the pool?” Cæsar asked his fiancée.
“No, it doesn’t me.”
“It does me.”
“Because you are a poet,” she said, “and I am not; I am very prosaic.”
“Really?”