Time went by; our young man was rich, or almost rich.

One day, after a long gallop, he alighted, tired out, near a tree and stretched himself in its shade.

It was a spring day, bright and blue,—one of those days in which men breathe voluptuously the warm air impregnated with passion, in which the blowing of the wind comes to the ear like distant harmonies, in which the clear horizons are outlined in gold, and there float before our eyes shining motes of I know not what, motes like transparent forms that follow us, encompass us and intoxicate us with sadness and with happiness at once.

“I dearly love these two beings,” exclaimed Andrés as he reclined there stroking his dog with one hand and with the other giving to his horse a handful of grass, “dearly; but yet there is a vacancy in my heart which has never been filled; I still have it in me to lavish a love greater, holier, purer. Decidedly I need a wife.”

At that moment there passed along the road a young girl with a water-jar upon her head.

Andrés was not thirsty, but yet he begged a drink of water. The girl stopped to offer it to him, and did so with such gentle grace that our youth comprehended perfectly one of the most patriarchal episodes of the Bible.

“What is your name?” he asked when he had drunk.

“Placida.”

“And what do you do with yourself?”

“I am the daughter of a merchant who died ruined and persecuted for his political opinions. After his death, my mother and I retired to a hamlet, where we get on very badly with a pension of three reales [fifteen cents a day] for all our living. My mother is ill, and everything comes on me.”

“And why haven’t you married?”

“I don’t know; in the village they say that I am good for nothing about work, that I am very delicate, very much the señorita.”

The girl, with a courteous good-bye, moved away.

While she was still in sight, Andrés watched her retreating form in silence; when she was lost to view, he said with the satisfaction of one who solves a problem:

“This is the woman for me.”

He mounted his horse and, followed by his dog, took his way to the village. He promptly made the acquaintance of the mother and, almost as soon, utterly lost his heart to the daughter. When at the end of a few months she was left an orphan, he married her, a man in love with his wife, which is one of the greatest blessings life affords.

To marry, and to set up housekeeping in a country mansion situated in one of the most picturesque spots of his native land, was the work of a few days.

When he saw himself in this residence, rich, with his wife, his dog and his horse, he had to rub his eyes; he thought he must be dreaming. So happy, so perfectly happy was poor Andrés.