"And does he never speak to you about—about—does he never talk love-nonsense to you?"
"Never, papa, I assure you. If he had, I should have known better than to listen to him."
Then Don Alfonso bowed his head on his hands and spoke no more to his daughter, sitting motionless in his chair for more than an hour, and when he at last raised his head, and rose from his seat to retire to his own room, Magdalen saw again on his face that old shadow of care and anxiety which had vanished from it during the last few months.
"If not a tyrant, then a traitor, so is every Spaniard," said Don Alfonso as Magdalen lifted up her face to his for a kiss before retiring.
As Magdalen lay down to rest, she buried her face in her pillow, longing to cry, but the tears would not come. Her sleep was troubled; in the morning she rose unrefreshed with a vague fear of something dreadful impending. The day passed quietly, just as other days did, and in the evening came Don Ciriaco, who was received by Don Alfonso with more than usual cordiality, but Magdalen pleaded a headache and hardly spoke to him at all.
A week after this, Doña Josefina Viana de Velasquez had one evening a numerous company in her sala. The occasion was a tertulia, an undress ball, given in welcome to her niece Constancia who had returned to the city after spending the summer at her quinta. At least such was the pretext announced for the tertulia, but Doña Josefina and her husband Don Fausto were fond of indulging their hospitable tastes and delighted to fill their rooms with young people and to give due scope to the flirting propensities of their friends, flirtation being in the opinion of the lady the most important business of life.
Some few days before this tertulia, she had paid a visit to Don Alfonso Miranda at his quinta, and noticing that Magdalen looked pale and out of spirits, had taken her back with her to spend some days in the city.
This day of the tertulia was also the day for one of the shooting excursions of the secret committee, and Doña Constancia told her aunt that she did not think Marcelino would be there that evening. But Marcelino heard that day from Evaña that Magdalen was staying with Doña Josefina; he hurried back to town, determined not to lose such an opportunity of conversing at his ease with her, away from the watchful eyes and often sneering words of her father. For months he had missed the smile of welcome with which she had been wont to greet him, and report had told him that the heart which he had once fondly thought was his had been given to another. He resolved to know all that evening, at the house of his aunt Josefina.
It was late when he entered the sala, the first person he met as he went in was Elisa Puyrredon. He and the fair Elisa had been playmates together when they were children; his little playmate was now a beautiful woman, with whom romping games were things of the far-off past. Yet the frank cordiality of her friendship for him had left him nothing to regret.