When SeÑora de PardiÑas observed that her son looked pale and preoccupied that evening at dinner, and even answered her shortly when she spoke to him, she thought to herself at once, “We are in for it now. That jewel has given him her news.” She intercepted, too, furtive glances, frightened and eloquent, between them, but she bore it all in silence, saying to herself, “According to Don Nicanor one must pretend to be a fool for a quarter of an hour every day in this world. But more than that falls to my share, for I must pretend to be a fool for months to come.” She pretended to be a fool then, acting as if she did not notice anything unusual in her son’s manner, asking him with a great show of interest about the pony, the stable, his companions in his rides. When the table-cloth was removed she introduced another subject of conversation, very timely, and of immediate and vital importance, namely, the examinations. “I think your turn will come about Wednesday or Thursday, child,” she began, “so that this week I shall have my hands full. For the fact is, that with those gentlemen one never knows what course to take. If they were all like Contreras! He knows how to be reasonable. Only Contreras won’t be your professor this year. With the others one doesn’t know what course to pursue; if one were to listen to this one and that one, it would be enough to make one crazy. Lastra wants people to bow down before him, to pay him the compliment of begging him, to be indebted to him. Ruiz del Monte seems to be just the opposite; if he is spoken to in behalf of a boy, he takes a dislike to him and torments the life out of him. You know whether that is so or not; it was your friend Diaz, the one who writes verses, who told me so. Of AlbirÁn they tell a different story—that he does not disregard intercession, but in rule and measure; according to whom it comes from. The safest thing would be for you to study, child.”

“I do study, mamma,” answered the student laconically.

During the whole of the evening it was impossible to draw another word from him. He turned over the illustrated papers, he took them up and laid them down, he changed his seat, passing from the chair to the sofa and from the sofa to the chair; he sighed profoundly, and, in short, gave every possible sign of distress, making no effort to conceal this distress, but, on the contrary, seeming to desire that his mamma should notice it. At last, when the latter said to him, “Are you not going for a while to the theater to-night?” he answered, in a hard and resolute tone:

“No, I am going to bed. My head aches a little.”

And he left the room and walked noisily through the hall to his study, which he entered, slamming the door behind him.

“It is as I said; we are in for it now,” she said to herself. “I have made a great mistake. I should have waited to settle this affair until the examinations were over, a few days before our departure. It was a piece of stupidity on my part. Well, you see, I wanted to get out of the mess quickly; but I was wrong. There are things that it is better to go slowly about. I must only see if I can remedy matters now by putting off the girl’s departure; otherwise the boy will be all upset when he most needs to keep a cool head. We must wait a while. I must see if I can persuade Don Gaspar to wait. I shouldn’t wonder if it would be harder to make the old man listen to reason than the boy. What complications! That perfidious Rita Pardo was right. One ought to consider well whom one receives into one’s house.”

There then took place in the little domestic drama that was now drawing near to its dÉnouement one of those byplays, like momentary truces, during which the actors, while appearing to be occupied with other interests, or while thus occupied in reality, do not yet lose sight of the main subject of the drama, continuing still to play a part, so to speak, and maintaining silence regarding the matter which chiefly occupies their minds, without deceiving anybody by this silence. SeÑora de PardiÑas put off the girl’s departure from day to day, calming the puerile impatience of Don Gaspar Febrero at the delay, with the excuse of the nearness of the examinations and the impossibility of remaining at such a time without a servant. Esclavita waited, hiding in the depths of her heart a tenacious hope, based on the words and the promises of Rogelio; and Rogelio, preoccupied and agitated, waited in vain for an opportunity to say something—something very serious and decided—to his mother. To speak the truth, however, if his mother had given him this opportunity he would not have known how to avail himself of it. As time passed, the courage which he had felt at first evaporated by degrees, like the essence in a vial which is left uncorked. It requires more resolution than appears at first sight for a good son to place himself in direct opposition to a good mother, and take a step, which to a certain extent emancipates him from maternal authority, but which at the same time wrings the inmost fibers of his heart. So blended together are natural duty, habit, and even that excusable selfishness which counsels us to place ourselves without reserve in the hands of one who loves us better than ourselves, that the breaking of this bond is an act of supreme courage, one of those efforts from which the will shrinks, unless it be of finely-tempered metal. Against a severe father there is always energy; his very severity serves as a tonic to the will; but a mother like Rogelio’s, whose first thought had always been her son, who had made him the object of so much solicitude, sparing him even the trouble of considering and the effort of desiring; a widowed mother, delicate in health, who had made it a practice to anticipate the wishes of her son, in this way preventing the will of her son from ever acquiring the robustness which struggles and privations give, was an adversary against whom Rogelio had not the strength to measure himself. “If she herself would introduce the subject,” he thought. But the truth is that if she had introduced it, the result would have been the same. All he ventured to do was to enter a mute protest, to show himself melancholy at times, and at times ill-tempered and sullen. “Mamma, in order not to see me looking unhappy, is capable of anything,” he reasoned, with the logic of a spoiled child. Only that his mamma knew how to discriminate between toys.

The examinations, too, had their effect in weakening his resolution still more. What with his studies, his fears of failure, and the coming and going of the friends who brought him an account of the rise and fall, so to say, of the marks, Rogelio found himself outside the magic circle by which an absorbing passion surrounds us, and if it were not that occasionally a pair of greenish eyes looked steadily into his, he would even have forgotten the danger which, by a curious illusion, seemed to him every day less imminent, being in reality more so, for the departure for Galicia was inevitably to take place immediately after the examinations.

And the examinations came, and Rogelio found that he had passed in two branches, but in one—the most difficult and uncongenial to him—there came upon him, like a dash of cold waiter, a conditioned. “I know who is to blame for this!” thought his mother, looking through the half-closed door at Esclava, who was dusting the pictures in the parlor. “This is what comes of flirtation; but what is to be done? every age has its tastes. He will gain in September what he loses now; he is young enough, provided he keeps well. And let us be just; the pony, too, made him lose his head in this last term. It is true that that was all the better. About the time lost in that way I don’t complain. The pony has behaved well. It deserves a lump of sugar.”