To one side rose the hill of San Salvador, its crest topped with the
Hermitage, and the pines, the cypresses, and the prickly pears around
that rough testimonial of popular piety. The sanctuary seemed to be
talking to him like an indiscreet friend, betraying the real motive that
had caused him to evade his appointment with his political friends and
disobey his mother into the bargain.

Something more than the beauty of the fields had enticed him from the
city. When the rays of the rising sun had awakened him that morning on
the train, the first thing he had seen, before opening his eyes even,
was an orange orchard, the bank of the Júcar, and a house painted
blue,--the very one that was now in sight away off there, among the
round tree-tops along the river.

How many times in past months his thoughts had lingered on the memory of
that same scene!

Afternoons, in the Congress, while the Premier on the Blue Bench would
be answering the interpellations of the Opposition in sharp incisive
tones, Rafael's brain would begin to doze, reduced to jelly, as it were,
by the incessant hammering of words, words, words! Before his closed
eyes a dark veil would begin to unroll as if the moist, cellar-like
gloom in which the Chamber is always plunged, had thickened suddenly,
and against this curtain, like a cinema dream, rows of orange-trees
would come into view, and a blue house with open windows; and pouring
through the windows a stream of notes from a soft voice, ever so sweet,
singing _lieder_ and ballads as an accompaniment to the hard, sonorous
paragraphs snapping from the Premier's teeth. Then applause and
disorder! The moment for voting had arrived, and the fading outlines of
the Blue House still hovering before his dreamy eyes, the member for