the benches of the conservative majority, with a battalion of dukes,
counts and marquises--young men who had become deputies to round out the
distinction conferred by beautiful sweethearts or winning
thoroughbreds,--all this had intoxicated him, filled his mind
completely, crowding out all other thoughts, and persuading him that he
had been completely cured.

But as he grew familiar with his new life, and the novelty of all this
adulation wore off, tenacious recollections rose again in his memory. At
night, when sleep relaxed the will to forget, which his vigilance kept
at painful tension, that blue house, the green, diabolical eyes of its
principal denizen, that pair of fresh lips with their ironic smile that
seemed to quiver between two rows of gleaming white teeth, would become
the inevitable center of all his dreams.

Why resist any longer? He could think of her as much as he
pleased--that, at least, his mother would never learn. And he gave
himself up to the imagination of love, where distance lent an ever
stronger enchantment to that woman.

He felt a vehement longing to return to his city. Absence seemed to do
away with all the obstacles at home. His mother was not so formidable as
he had thought. Who could tell whether, when he went back--changed as he
felt himself to be by his new experiences--it would not be easier to
continue the old relations? After so much isolation and solitude she
might receive him in more cordial fashion!

The Cortes were about to adjourn, so, in obedience to repeated urging
from his fellow-partisans, and from doña Bernarda, to _do
something_--anything at all--to show interest in the home town--he took