Sebastian Ruy, Marques del Torre, too, was bred as a young nobleman of oldest lineage should be, or should have been, in that early eighteenth century that still lingered then in the Andes. But this took him to Madrid and to Paris in the years VII. and VIII.; and the eighteenth century, as one knows, ended in those wee small numbers. Torre came back to plunge his country in a revolution which lasted intermittently, like one of its own volcanoes, for more than twenty years. The young Parisian étudiant began his first émeute in Carácas itself, with a barricade after the orthodox fashion of the years I. and II. This being quickly suppressed--partly that there were no pavements, and partly that each house was an impregnable fortress--but mostly that the city was of the governing class and stood with Spain--Torre had had to leave the capital for the pampas, where, for over twelve years, he maintained discursive warfare with a changeable command of Indians and peons, which, however, on the whole, increased in numbers, officered by a few young gentlemen, under himself. His marquisate he forgot, and sought to make others forget it. He was, throughout Venezuela, The General. He had never been back within the walls of Carácas; and, at nearly forty, he learned of his only aunt’s death following his uncle’s, and of the little girl they left, and of his guardianship. A little girl she appeared to his imagination on the pampas; when he got to Carácas, she was a young woman. The General’s locks were already grizzled and his face weather-beaten with ten years’ open life on the plains; his face was marked, close beside the eye, with the scar of a sabre. He had one interview with Dolores, saw her nurse, her instructors, her father confessor; heard stories about his nephew Don Ramon, which troubled him, went back to camp.