“I do it because I have delicacy--a plant that strikes so deep when once it has taken root, that neither the silver plough nor the golden spade which cultivates the field of ideas of the present day can turn it out. I counsel a man who has done a wrong to repair it. I advise one who has been the ruin of an honest girl to become her defender. And the more public he has made her position, the more he is bound to set her right in the eyes of others. If the future looks smiling, I counsel it all the more earnestly, that the past may not reproach him. In my days, gentlemen, marriages were not discussed in semi-public meetings. The only counsellors were, according to the circumstances, the heart, the honor, and the conscience. But,” added the old man, rising, “my sentiments are as much out of harmony with yours, as my person is out of place in a reunion of gay young men. Gentlemen, I salute you. Nephew, good-by. Do not ask me to your brilliant wedding if you marry with the million-heiress of the caprices. If with Lucia, I will be your groomsman.” With these words the noble veteran took his leave. “Style of an epic poem,” said the pseudo-Parisian. “Tone of an _elegiac lyric_,” stammered the copy. “One would think the governor had been drinking some kind of palate-skinning Catalan wine, instead of the excellent, exquisite, delectable, delicious--” “Enough, _Boni_,” interrupted his friend, indicating to him with his foot the urgent necessity of more discretion. “The general has, so to speak, one foot in the grave, and, naturally, all looks to him _de profundis_ color,” observed Gallardo’s intimate. “But we live in a positive age, and must conform to the step of its march; to do otherwise would be to make ourselves antiquated and ridiculous.” Days followed days, each one bringing to our hero its business, novelty, interest, and forgetfulness of those that had preceded it. Lucia, in the meantime, saw her means of subsistence failing without informing him; for, with the reawakened sentiments of duty and shame, came the comprehension of her guilty dependence, and sense of the double humiliation of soliciting and receiving. She had lived for some time by the sale of her valuables, but this resource was almost exhausted. “What is to become of me?” she questioned, with more of weakness than 195 inquietude, more inertia than anguish, as she sat one day alone, her head drooping upon her breast. “In forgetting how to work, I have been like the sailor that forgets in a calm how to handle the ropes. What shall I do when all is gone? What can he who has brought me to this be thinking of?” Her questionings were interrupted by the entrance of the woman of the house with a letter. “It is from Madrid,” she said, with a fawning smile. “I’ll bet that the general tells when he is coming, and confirms the report of his appointment as captain-general of this province.” Lucia opened and read the following epistle: