Benito PErez Galdos

REASON VERSUS PASSION.

The following day Leon had visitors; two friends who gave him some information which, though certainly interesting, was far from pleasing to him, and he spent the day in agitations and the night without sleep. Early in the morning he called Facunda and told her that he was going away; then an hour later he said to himself: “No I must stay—I ought to stay.”

In the afternoon he rode out, and on his return sent a message to Pepa saying that he wished to speak with her.

Since the day when the news of Cimarra’s death had reached them, Leon had hardly seen her; a feeling of delicacy had kept him from repeating his visits to Suertebella.

Pepa received him in the evening in Monina’s nursery, where he had seen the little girl suffering and dying. This evening the saucy baby, lying half-uncovered on the bed, was rebellious to the law which sends children to sleep betimes. Kicking and tossing between the sheets she was chattering to herself, relating scraps of all the stories she knew, full of fun and impudence; beginning long speeches that ended in nothing, punishing her doll after she had fed it, sitting up in bed to bow like a gentleman, and making a peep-hole with her tiny fingers to imitate the Baron de Soligny’s eye-glass. After much ado, between laughter and a pretence of severity, Pepa succeeded in making her kneel up and repeat a pater noster with a very bad grace and a great many yawns. This she followed up with a baby hymn and, as though this innocent litany had a soporific virtue, Monina dropped upon the pillow and her eyelids closed over her unwilling eyes while she was still murmuring the last words of the verse.

They stood watching her for some time in silence, and then Leon, bending down to kiss her, said:

“Good-bye, little pet,” in a tremulous voice.

“Why good-bye?” asked Pepa anxiously. “Are you going away?”

“Yes.”

“You sent word that you wanted to see me?”

“To take leave.”

“Are you not happy here?”

“Immensely happy—but I must not stay.”

“I do not understand; have you made it up with your wife?”

“No.”

“You are going abroad?”

“Perhaps.”

“Where to?”

“I have not made up my mind.”

“But you will let us know; you will write?”

“Nay; perhaps not even that.”

Pepa looked steadily at the floor.

“It is folly that you and I should talk in riddles and beat about the bush,” said Leon. “For some months we have always used vague phrases, as if we had something to hide. If there is any guilt in our souls it had better be plainly uttered than hypocritically concealed. In fact I must speak out.

“After I had so completely lost every dream of domestic happiness I became a constant visitor at your house. Perhaps—nay indeed, certainly—I went there too often. My loneliness, my dulness, my longing for some of the pleasures of a home life, led me there in search of that comfort which is as necessary to the human soul as equilibrium is to the body. I was perishing of cold; what wonder then that I went where I found warmth? I began by amusing myself with Monina, I ended by worshipping her, for I felt not merely a want but the maddest craving to love and be loved. It is so easy to win a child’s love. I had a wild desire to revel in childish things, to lay my heart, empty and void as it was, at her baby feet for her to stamp upon it—I do not know how else to express it—but you will understand. I always fancy you can read my soul since yours is no secret to me. I feel as though for a long time we had been acting a comedy....”

“I never act!” interrupted Pepa.

“No, no, nor I, but listen. I was alone; at home, in the street, in the turmoil of society everywhere; always alone except when I was by your side. A fatality ... nay, I will not give that conventional name to the consequences of our own errors and want of foresight.... I will say the situation in which we had placed ourselves forbid our declaring honestly the feelings of our hearts. We were both married.”

“Yes,” said Pepa calmly and steadily, as having often made the same reflection, and said the same thing to herself, having contemplated the fact many times and from every possible point of view.

“Now, to be sure, you are free, but I am not. The situation is not materially altered; but the fact that you are a widow is maddening me.—I ought not to be here at this moment—and yet here I am! When I see you and Monina dressed in black I am filled with a ferment of sacrilegious passion; I struggle to quell it and be silent, but you yourself drag me on with irresistible force and compel me.... Well, there is but one way of saying it ... to tell you that I love you; that I have loved you for a long time. I cannot find courage or words to curse this passion, which in me is the outcome of my banishment from all happiness, and in you of ... I don’t know what.”

“It was born with me,” said Pepa under her breath. “You have told me what my heart knew already.... But to hear you say it ... with your own lips ... here, to my face.... Here, where only God and I can hear....”

Her voice failed her and she turned as pale as death: she could find no utterance for the feelings that crowded on her soul, but she seized one of Leon’s hands and kissed it again and again with passionate tenderness.

“We are in a very difficult position,” he said. “We must face it together.”

“A difficult position!” repeated Pepa with candid surprise, as though to her it seemed a very simple matter.

“Yes, for at this moment we are both the victims of calumny.”

Pepa shrugged her shoulders as much as to say: “What do I care for calumny?”

“You will feel with me that I made a great mistake in coming to live so near you.”

“A mistake! In coming to Carabanchel!” she exclaimed in an accent that conveyed that if that was a mistake, then so was the daily rising of the sun.

“Yes, a great mistake. But indeed I, who am regarded by a good many people as a man of sense, am always making mistakes in matters of conduct.” Pepa thought that possible. “My last blunder has given a pretext to scandal. My poor darling, do you know that they say in Madrid that within two months of your husband’s death you have encouraged a lover; that I am that lover; and that we are living in open defiance of all decency and morality. Not content with this they have chosen to invent a piece of retrospective slander, supporting it by what passes for substantial evidence.”

“And what is that?”

“Monina is said to be my child.”

For a minute Pepa stood bewildered; but the terrible charge had made no very deep impression on her mind. By a rapid and inexplicable process of logic she said:

“The calumny is so preposterous, so absurd, that we need not let it distress us.”

“Do you know of any shield against which the arrows of calumny are shattered?” said Leon. “There is but one and that is innocence. Our innocence, Pepa, is not immaculate. The slander that is directed against us is not without foundation; it is mistaken only as to the facts. It is false when it asserts that I am your favoured lover, but it is true when it says that I love you—it lies when it says that Monina is my child, but it is true—” Pepa did not let him finish the sentence.

“But it is true that you love her as if she were!” she exclaimed with joyous haste.

“Calumny may be wrong as to the facts, but failing facts she has intentions, desires, hopes to go upon. Answer me, can you say that we are innocent?”

“No. I, at any rate, am not. The scandal that has dragged my name in the mud is a just punishment,” said Pepa sadly. “And if I think of it with less horror than I ought to feel, it is because there is so much, so very much to excuse part—most—the foundation of the report. You are upright, honest, steadfast—I am not. I have allowed myself to cherish feelings in my heart in opposition to my duty; I am a wicked woman, Leon; I do not deserve your love; I am guilty, and I cannot feel that delicate horror of calumny you feel.”

“Pepa, Pepa, do not talk so,” said Leon grasping her hand. “It is not thus that I have seen you, dreamed of, as, by degrees, you have conquered my heart and become sovereign of my affections.”

“But if you cannot love me as I am,” she said, her words almost choked with grief and bitterness, “why did you not come in time? Oh! if you had come when I wanted you, you might have found me lofty and pure! What a high and holy devotion—worthy of you indeed—you would have found under the childish follies which were nothing but the mad outbursts of an oppressed heart and a fevered fancy, if you had come in time and vouchsafed a loving word to the wilful girl, mad and foolish as she was, what a treasure of devotion would have been yours!—it was reserved for you, and in your hands it would have been refined and purified. I was a rough ore, apparently of no value—nay, I might have been a misfortune to the owner—you thought so? But all I needed was to fall into hands that were not put out to take me; I was an instrument that could yield no music excepting in the hands for which I was born, and without my natural master all was jangling discord. Do not complain then if you now find me somewhat wanting in principles and moral sense. I have suffered much; I have led a life of constant and fearful struggle with myself, my life has been passed in utter disharmony with those I have had to live with; I felt myself scorned and misunderstood and that has always weighed upon my soul; it made me unreasonable and perverse and so, by degrees, I lost that purity of soul which once I cherished for you—you who would not have it as a gift! I am not so strict as you are; my conscience is less sensitive, and I have no courage left for further sacrifices, for my heart is weary and as full of wounds as a madman who tries to kill himself. I cannot admit that the world has the right to require me to torture myself any more; it has imposed sufferings enough upon me—and so I dare to ask you too to be less severely strong, to ignore the moral susceptibilities of society, to make some concession to feeling, to remain here and see me every day, to pay me some portion of the debt you owe me—by loving a little.”

She could not command her voice to the end of her speech and burst into tears.

“It was my idiotic pride,” said Leon, more ready to accuse than to defend himself, “that has brought misery on us both. May the scorn of which you speak be visited on my own head and all the evil wrought by my mistake be mine to suffer!”

“Nay, you need no more disasters; you have had enough to go through! The fault was not all yours. I had no other merit than that of loving you; I was wilful, violent and spoilt; I quite understand your preference for ... her; and she was so handsome; I was never good-looking.... And now, now after so many years, you come to me ... and now....” She could not say it; her brow was contracted with despair, at length, with a gesture of horror, as if she saw some terrific vision she said hoarsely: “You have a wife.”

Leon could say nothing in reply to the appalling eloquence of this fact. He bent his head in silence. “A wife! handsome, saintly, impeccable!” Pepa went on. “But even so, have I not triumphed? You have left her and come to me.” And she looked up radiantly.

“No, no,” said Leon eagerly. “It is she who has left me. I loved her and did all in my power to prevent the rupture of the sacred tie that binds us; I have kept my marriage vows faithfully ... till now, when I have broken them.”

“And they are better broken!” exclaimed Pepa vehemently. “Why should you respect the judgment of fools? Why should the image of your wife come between you and me?”

“Pepa, my dearest, be calm for pity’s sake; your wild words alarm me.”

“But I tell you I have no moral sense; I lost it—you took it with my last hopes. When one is hopeless is that not the same as being wicked? I have been wicked ever since that evening when my last hope died out of me as though it had been my very soul, and left me rigid and cold—as if really and truly mad. From that moment I have gone wrong in everything; I married just as I might have flung myself into the sea; I married as a substitute for suicide. I did not know what I was doing, but there was a seed of evil in me that I actually tried to foster into growth. If only I had been well educated! but I had no education; I was a savage, and I loved to display my riches, social advantages and pinchbeck splendour,—just as the Caffirs display feathers and beads. And bitter pique rankled in my heart and made me resolve that I would give to the least worthy suitor what I had intended for the most worthy. If I could not have the best I would take the worst! Do you remember my throwing out my jewels on the dust-heap? I wanted to do the same with myself. Of what use was I if no one loved me? How could I marry a good and worthy man? It would have been folly ... no, no, I wanted to hate some one—to hate the man who was nearest to me—whom the world would call my other half, and the church pronounce my mate. You see I longed to be wicked! In our rank of life, you know, when a girl of base instincts craves for liberty, marriage is a wide and open door. In my madness I said to myself: ‘I am rich; I will marry a fool and I shall be free;’ and I never thought of my poor father. Oh yes, I have been very wicked!

“Well, many a girl has done the same, though not with such fatal consequences. I married, and every conceivable misfortune fell upon me and mine ... I was free—but you were as far off as ever. Your very virtue enraged me, though it gave me much to think of. Would you believe that I was quite humiliated by it, and at times flattered my fancy by dreams of being virtuous too? God knows what the end might have been! He saved me by giving me my child. Her birth brought an interval of peace which till then I had not known; as Monina grew under my eyes I seemed to become miraculously gifted with intelligence, prudence, a love of order, and common-sense. I was a different creature, I became what I should have been if, instead of the torments of rejected love, I had lived in peace under the yoke of your authority.

“Now I am cured of those vagaries which made me notorious; I am not as good as I ought to be; I do not fear God as I ought; I cannot feel ready to sacrifice my feelings to the laws to which I have been a martyr; I see now that I have been living in a world of empty dogmas, where fine words are more plentiful than good deeds, and so I say: ‘I am free, you are free....’”

“I?”

“Yes, you. For a man is free who breaks his chains. Did you not say that she had left you?”

“Yes!” A pained and doubting expression came over Leon’s features.

“No! I see that it is I—always I—who am really abandoned!” cried Pepa. “Well, so be it!”

“Abandoned, no. But there is a moral impossibility which neither you nor I can fail to see. As for me, I am in the most desperate and wretched dilemma that any man ever had to face.”

Pepa looked straight into his eyes in agonised expectation of what he might say next.

“I am married; I do not love my wife, nor does she love me. We are incompatible natures; there is a gulf between us. We are separated by utter antipathy, as strong in her as in me. But why did my wife become alienated from me? She was faithful and virtuous, she brought no dishonour on my name—if she had I would have killed her! As it is I cannot kill her—nor divorce her; even a legal separation is out of the question. The only crime that has come between us is religion. Of what do I accuse her? Of being a bigot, a fanatic. And is that a fault?... Who can decide? Now and then with shameful sophistry it has occurred to me that I might accuse her of insanity; horrible thought! And what right have I to call any excess of pious practices insane? God alone can read hearts and determine the boundary line between piety and fanaticism. In my own soul I can declare that my wife is a fanatic; but I have no right to accuse her before all the world.”

Leon spoke calmly and judicially as he uttered these questions and answers. As though he were pleading and arguing for and against a criminal.

“My wife has sinned against love, which is as much a law of marriage as fidelity,” he went on. “But she has done nothing to disgrace me; is there then sufficient cause for me to pronounce myself free?”

“Yes, if your wife has ceased to love you; she has annulled the marriage.”

“She has annulled it by her fanatical religion. But I look into my conscience and say: ‘Am I not as guilty as she is?’ For if she has a form of fanaticism that impels her to abhor me, have I not a kindred fanaticism which makes me abhor her? She holds a scheme of belief that parts her from me; I too have a scheme of belief that drives me from her. Am I not perhaps a bigot too?”

“You, no! It is she, it is she.”

“At the stage which we have reached, which of us is the more to blame? Fanatical she is, no doubt; but she has a thoroughly good and upright nature. MarÍa is incapable of a dishonourable action; she is a bigot and narrow-minded, but she is honest. She does not love me, but she loves no one else. Am I not perhaps the guilty one ... I who love another?” He passed his hand across his aching brow and paused to consider the desperate case.

“Even if I should decide that I would be free,” he said at last. “I could marry no one else. I could not dream of founding another home; neither law nor conscience would admit of it. I must abide by the consequences of my errors. I am not, and I never can be, one of the crowd who acknowledge no law human or divine; I cannot do as those do who have a moral code for their public acts but whose private life is corrupt, whose thoughts are evil. My family, if I had one would be illegitimate, my children would be bastards and nameless, we should breathe an atmosphere of disgrace. Do not suppose that in speaking thus and in flying from the situation in which we find ourselves, I am surrendering to the gossip of Madrid; nor even that, in speaking of the illegitimacy of such ties, I am bowing to the decisions of the law which is impotent to decide the right and wrong of this vital question on moral grounds. I am simply obeying my conscience, which makes itself heard above all the other voices of my heart. Appeal to your own conscience....”

Pepa drooped sadly as though she were falling to the ground, but putting her hand to her head she murmured:

“My conscience is love.”

There was something deeply pathetic in this declaration from a woman who for long years had been storing up treasures of affection without knowing on whom to bestow them and who now saw herself condemned to lavish them as best she might on the images of a joyless and fevered fancy.

“But picture to yourself,” said Leon, “all the odious and disreputable conditions of an illegitimate, or I would rather say an immoral, family. The children without a name—the ever-present image of the absent wife....”

“Do not name her; I tell you not to name her,” cried Pepa, making an effort not to be too vehement. “Her mad fanaticism excludes her altogether!”

“But if I am no less fanatical?”

“No, that makes no difference!”

“Well, there is one remedy for the state of mind from which you and I are doomed to suffer.”

“What is that?”

“Hope.”

“Hope!” murmured Pepa, shaking her head; the word found a melancholy echo in her brain. “Hope! that is my fate, there are lives in which hope is a torment and not a comfort.”

“Look at that little angel,” said Leon, pointing to Monina who slept in blissful ignorance at the storm that was rolling over her innocent dreams; “there is your true conscience. When all this agitation is over if your bitterness still survives and your sad memories prompt you to wander from the right path, let your thoughts dwell upon your child. You will find that act like a magic charm. A hundred sermons, and all the logic in the world, could not teach you what you will learn from one smile of that tiny creature, whose innocence hardly seems of the earth; and in her eyes you will read perfect truth.”

“You are right, you are right,” cried Pepa bursting into tears.

“Her eyes are like a mirror in which if you can read it rightly you may see something of the future. Think of your child as grown up, as a woman fifteen years hence; how could you bear that some malignant tongue should whisper in her ear shameful tales of her mother’s disgrace? Think of your feelings if some one were to say to her: ‘your mother, before she had been a widow two months, had taken for her lover a married man, the husband of a faithful wife.’”

“Oh, no!” cried Pepa with a flash of indignation, “that they shall never say!”

“But they will say so; why not? If they are ready to say what is not true, why should they not say what is? You must think of the fateful and inevitable influence that a parent’s actions have on the children. There is certain tradition of morality which is a great protection against disaster and dishonour.”

“I implore you not even to suggest that my child can ever be anything but innocence itself!” exclaimed Pepa, drowned in tears.

Then they were both silent; they sat on Ramona’s bed, arm in arm, with their faces very near together, wrapped, as it were, in an atmosphere of tenderness that breathed from them both, gazing in loving contemplation of the child’s happy slumbers. Deep, very deep, down in her heart Pepa was thinking: “child of my body and soul, I can be happy so long as I feel that you are mine, and fancy that I can bestow you on some one I can trust.”

Presently they rose from their place side by side and Pepa seated herself in a dim corner.

“I must be going,” said Leon.

“Already!” said Pepa in dismay and looking up at him imploringly.

Leon was about to answer when they heard footsteps and the marquis came into the room; he was in the habit of coming to bid his daughter good-night before he retired for the evening. He was surprised to see Leon, though there was nothing unusual in the hour for a visit.

“What is the matter? Is Monina ill?”

“No, Papa, she is quite well.”

“Ah. I fancied—” and the marquis kissed his daughter. “I am glad to see you here,” he said kindly to Leon.

“I came to say good-bye to Pepa and to you.”

“You are going on a journey? Well, it is the best thing you can do. And where are you going?”

“I have not made up my mind.”

“And you start....”

“To-morrow.”

“If you go to Paris I will give you a commission. I will go to your lodgings early in the morning; just now I am going to bed, I have a headache.”

Leon saw that he must leave at once.

“Good-bye, good-bye,” he said grasping Pepa’s hands. Their eyes met with a keen glance; she was disappointed at this abrupt leave-taking. Leon looked at the sleeping child and then, with calm self-possession, he went out. He felt a stranger in the suites of rooms as he passed through them; but the pretty nest he had just left was so intimately part of his life that he could hardly forbear from turning back to breathe once more in that atmosphere of peace and contentment—an atmosphere full of the delicious sense of home, hallowed by a woman’s love and a child’s slumbers.

As they parted Don Pedro said:

“I am very uneasy at having heard no details of Federico’s death.”

Leon made no reply; he went out into the garden. There, so many remembrances appealed to his affections that at every step he paused to sigh and dream. He had reached the avenue that led from the gardens to the stables when he heard himself called, with a shrill “hist” that came on his ear as sharp as a dart. He turned and saw Pepa, wrapped in a shawl with her head uncovered, coming towards him in breathless haste. She eagerly grasped his hand.

“I could not bear that we should part like this,” she said, “it is too hard!”

“It is as it ought to be,” replied Leon greatly disturbed. “And what does it matter? I shall come in to-morrow for a moment.”

“For a moment!” cried Pepa in pathetic reproach. “Think what it is to have given years—long years—as long as centuries, and to be repaid with moments!”

Leon took both her hands firmly in his.

“My dearest,” he said, “one of us must yield to the other. I know, and I tell you, that if I allow myself to be dragged away by you our ruin is complete. Then let yourself be guided—not dragged away—by me and save our souls alive.”

“And then—but I know what you will say: Hope! Every madman has his hobby!” and she smiled, a heart-rending smile of self-pity that might have drawn tears from a stone. “Hope! and if I die first?”

“No, no, you will not die ...” Leon murmured, taking her head between his hands as if she had been a child and kissing her.

“I am but a helpless thing,” stammered Pepa, who could hardly command her voice, “you can do what you will with me; but you are cruel.”

“And you will obey?”

“Nay, you need not ask; I have long obeyed you in intention. I used to dream that you came to see me, when you had in fact forgotten my very existence; that you commanded me to break with every duty, and I obeyed you with all the force of my will and desires. This submission was my only joy—a melancholy one! Do not blame me for the aberrations of a broken heart—I only tell you that you may see that if I would follow you to any crime, I shall not refuse to follow you when you lead me to do right.”

“Where would you have me lead you?” muttered Leon clasping his brow. “Tell me, if I were to say ...”

“What?” asked Pepa quickly and catching at his idea as a bird catches a seed before it can fall to the ground.

“The idea of flight has passed through your mind?“

“Oh! every idea in turn has passed through my mind.”

“So that if I were to say ...”

“If you say ‘come,’ I am ready.“

“Now?”

“This very minute. I would take my baby in my arms....“

Pepa, vehement in her devotions, looked first at the house and then in his face; forgetful of every other consideration, she could think of nothing but the two beings she loved. Leon was going through a brief but agonising struggle. He stamped with his foot like the Warlocks of old when they wanted to call up a familiar spirit.

“But I must bid you let me go alone, and wait, and hope,” he said at length, with a firmness that was almost heroic, and Pepa bowed her head with resignation. “I say it because I love you—out of a certain selfishness too, for I cannot bear to destroy a beautiful dream.”

“I submit,” said Pepa, but the word was hardly more than a moan, and hiding her face on his breast, she sobbed aloud. Then she added: “but you will fix a time. If I were to die before....”

This idea of an early death was fixed in her mind like a sinister star that nothing could eclipse.

“Yes, I will fix a time. I promise that.”

“And when it comes....”

“When it comes—” echoed Leon who could hardly breathe; some demon seemed to have flung a rope round his neck and to be tightening the noose.

“Supposing that God does not open the way....”

“But He will.”

“And if He does not.”

“But He will.”

“But, I say if He does not?”

“You will see He will.”

“Your conviction makes me believe it, but I do not know why,” said Pepa, turning her head on his shoulder as though it were a pillow on which she might fall asleep. “Now, if you want me to go home satisfied, tell me that you love me very much.” Her eagerness had taken a childish tone.

“You know it.”

“That you will love me always—always.”

“That in fact I loved you when we played together and stained our faces with blackberries,” added Leon, stroking the golden head.

“What days those were!” said Pepa, smiling like a soul in bliss, “we could talk for hours of those recollections, taking the words out of each other’s mouth. Ah! our life then was what life ought to be. Really life; not these horribly short moments and sudden changes. If only we might chatter, laugh, remember, talk nonsense and read each other’s thoughts and wishes!”

“If we could...!”

“But we must live apart. We have lived apart all our lives, and yet I feel as if I were saying good-bye for the first time. You go to an inn and I to a palace.”

“Take care of your child for me.”

“Oh! there is one terrible thought: if it is long before you come again she will not know you, she will be afraid of you.”

“She will soon get over that.”

“But are you not coming again to-morrow morning?”

“What for? That we may have another and more cruel parting? If I were to see you again my courage might fail me.”

“I will send Monina to see you.”

“Yes, send her,” and Leon coughed.

“Mercy!” exclaimed Pepa anxiously, and turning up the collar of his coat. “You are catching cold! it is chilly—take care of yourself ... so—”

“Thank you, my darling; I am cold, I confess.”

“Well, then, we part now?”

“Yes,” said Roch, “now or never.”

The words: “then never!” were on Pepa’s lips, but she dared not utter them.

“And you will write to me very often, like a good boy?“

“Yes, every week.”

“Long, long letters?”

“As long and as full as the thoughts of a man that waits in hope.”

“And where shall I write to you?”

“I will let you know. Let us walk towards the house; you must not go back alone. We will part there.”

“Come as far as the door of the museum; I came out there and can get in again.”

They walked on; Leon with his right arm round Pepa and holding both her hands in his left.

“It is a dark night,” observed Pepa, with that inexplicable impulse to speak of trivial things which comes over us when the mind is fully occupied with a fixed train of ideas.

“Are you happy?” asked Leon trying to speak lightly.

“How should I be when you are going away? And yet I am, glad of all you have said to me. It is a mixture of pain and gladness. First I say to myself: ‘what joy!’ and then I feel that I shall die of grief.”

“And I feel just the same,” said Leon gloomily. They were at the door of the museum.

“Good-bye, good-bye,” she said, “remember, you are mine.”

“Au revoir,” said Leon in a choked voice, and he kissed her twice. “This one for Monina, and this for her mother.”

The door opened on a dark staircase; Leon gently pushed Pepa in and hurried away; she reappeared for a moment and he waved his hand.

In a few minutes he had reached his lodgings; crushed with grief he threw himself into his study chair, not knowing whether to find relief in tears or in dumb despair. His heart was broken; and yet the deep and spacious reservoir of sorrow and passion had not yet poured the whole of its crushing contents on his devoted head.

END OF VOL. I.

GLORIA.—A novel, by B. PÉrez GaldÓs, from the Spanish by Clara Bell, in two vols. Paper, $1.00, Cloth, $1.75.