your cowardice, your folly, your soft-heartedness."

"But--but, niece!"

The canon's voice rose higher every time he repeated this phrase, and,
with his hands to his ears, he shook his head from side to side with
a look of mingled grief and desperation. The shrill complaint of Maria
Remedios grew constantly shriller, and pierced the brain of the unhappy
and now dazed priest like an arrow. But all at once the woman's face
became transformed; her plaintive wail was changed to a hard, shrill
scream; she turned pale, her lips trembled, she clenched her hands,
a few locks of her disordered hair fell over her forehead, her eyes
glittered, dried by the heat of the anger that glowed in her breast; she
rose from her seat and, not like a woman, but like a harpy, cried:

"I am going away from here! I am going away from here with my son! We
will go to Madrid; I don't want my son to fret himself to death in
this miserable town! I am tired now of seeing that my son, under the
protection of the cassock, neither is nor ever will be any thing. Do you
hear, my reverend uncle? My son and I are going away! You will never see
us again--never!"

Don Inocencio had clasped his hands and was receiving the thunderbolts
of his niece's wrath with the consternation of a criminal whom the
presence of the executioner has deprived of his last hope.

"In Heaven's name, Remedios," he murmured, in a pained voice; "in the
name of the Holy Virgin----"

These fits of range of his niece, who was usually so meek, were as