"How do we know? We were in the parlor with her grace, dancing before the birth-place. Ventura came in, and mother told us to go somewhere else with the music, for it made her head ache, and when we were going out Ventura told her, I heard it, father, that she did right to put the door between, for the little angels of God were the devil's little witnesses. Is it true, father, are we the devil's little witnesses?"
To whom has it not happened, at some time in his life, in great or in less important circumstances, that a single word has been the key to open and explain; the torch to illuminate the present and the past; to bring out of oblivion and light up a train of circumstances and incidents which had transpired unperceived, but which now unite, to form an opinion, to fix a conviction or to root a belief? Such was the effect upon Perico of the words, which the decree of expiation seemed to have put into the mouth of innocence.
Late, but terrible, the truth presented itself to the eyes which good faith had kept closed, and doubt took possession of the heart so healthy and so shielded by honor that a suspicion had never entered it.
"Father, father!" cried the children, seeing him tremble and turn pale. Perico did not hear them.
"Mamma Anna," they exclaimed, as the latter entered, "hurry, father is sick!"
As he heard his mother enter, Perico turned his perplexed eyes toward her, and seemed to read again in her severe countenance the terrible sentence she had once pronounced upon a future from which her loving foresight would have preserved him: "A bad daughter will be a bad wife." Overwhelmed, he rushed out of the house, muttering a pretext for his flight which no one understood.
Anna put her head out of the window, and felt relieved as she saw that he went toward the fields.
"Could any one have told him that goats have broken into the wheat?"
"It is very likely, mother; he suspected it yesterday," answered Elvira. But dinner-time came, and Perico did not appear.