With these words the noble veteran took his leave.
“Style of an epic poem,” said the pseudo-Parisian.
“Tone of an elegiac lyric,” stammered the copy. “One would think the governor had been drinking some kind of palate-skinning Catalan wine, instead of the excellent, exquisite, delectable, delicious—”
“Enough, Boni,” interrupted his friend, indicating to him with his foot the urgent necessity of more discretion.
“The general has, so to speak, one foot in the grave, and, naturally, all looks to him de profundis color,” observed Gallardo’s intimate. “But we live in a positive age, and must conform to the step of its march; to do otherwise would be to make ourselves antiquated and ridiculous.”
Days followed days, each one bringing to our hero its business, novelty, interest, and forgetfulness of those that had preceded it. Lucia, in the meantime, saw her means of subsistence failing without informing him; for, with the reawakened sentiments of duty and shame, came the comprehension of her guilty dependence, and sense of the double humiliation of soliciting and receiving. She had lived for some time by the sale of her valuables, but this resource was almost exhausted.
“What is to become of me?” she questioned, with more of weakness than inquietude, more inertia than anguish, as she sat one day alone, her head drooping upon her breast. “In forgetting how to work, I have been like the sailor that forgets in a calm how to handle the ropes. What shall I do when all is gone? What can he who has brought me to this be thinking of?”
Her questionings were interrupted by the entrance of the woman of the house with a letter.
“It is from Madrid,” she said, with a fawning smile. “I’ll bet that the general tells when he is coming, and confirms the report of his appointment as captain-general of this province.”
Lucia opened and read the following epistle: