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For some weeks, Manolo kept quiet. But early one morning a couple of rural guards found the body of a man on the river-bank. His body was covered with stabs. All investigations to find the murderer were fruitless. The crime remained unavenged.
He thought about his son, about Rafaela and Manolo Berlanga, seeming to behold their faces and even their clothing just as they had been long ago; and he felt surprised that revocation of the silversmith's face should produce no pain in him. At that moment and in spite of the irreparable injury which had been done him, he felt no hatred of Berlanga.
Noon came, and Manolo did not return for dinner. Night drew on, nor did he come back to sleep. Zureda and his wife went to bed early. A few days drifted along. Sunday morning, Zureda was sitting at the door of his shop. It was just eleven. Women, some with mantillas, others with but a simple kerchief knotted about their heads, were going to mass.
All at once Amadeo, who was looking for some excuse to get into a row with the silversmith, cheated openly and took the pot. Manolo saw him cheat. Incensed, he threw his cards on the floor. "Here now, that don't go!" he cried. "I don't care if we are friends, you can't get away with that!" All the other players, angered, backed up the silversmith. "No, sir! No, that don't go, here!" they echoed.
Only one trouble disturbed and embittered the peaceful decline of Amadeo Zureda. This trouble was his son, Manolo. Through an excess of fatherly love, doubtless mistaken, he had the year before got Manolo exempted from military service. The boy's wild, vicious character was fanatically rebellious against all discipline. In vain Zureda sought to teach him a trade.
Next morning the old man, who had hardly slept more than an hour or two, woke early. "What time is it?" asked he. Rafaela had already risen. She answered: "Almost six." "Has Manolo come back?" "Not yet." The old engineer got out of bed, dressed as usual and went down to his shop. Rafaela kept watch on him. The apparent calm of the old man looked suspicious.
All the hate that, long ago, had flung him upon Berlanga, now had burst forth again in a fresh, strong, overwhelming torrent. Suddenly Manolo stepped up to his father and seized him by the lapel. "You going to shut up?" he snarled, in rage. "Or are you bound to drive me to it?" Zureda's answer was a smash in the face.
Cautiously the engineer guarded against telling Rafaela that their son had returned. A little while before supper, giving her the excuse that Don Adolfo was waiting for him at the Casino, Zureda left the house and made his way to the inn where Manolo was wont to meet his rough friends. There he found him, indeed, gaming with cards. "I've got something to say to you," said he.
Then, after a brief moment of silent struggle: "Darling! Don't you see? It had to be this way !" The wife of Zureda did not, in fact, put up much of a fight. A year later, Rafaela gave birth to a boy. Manolo Berlanga stood godfather for it. Both Rafaela and Amadeo agreed on naming it Manolo Amadeo Zureda. How pink-and-white, how joyous, how pretty was little Manolín!
And always after that, when he saw her pass along, he would heave a sigh in an absurd, romantic manner. On the first of every month, Rafaela always wrote a four-page letter to Zureda, containing all the petty details of her quiet, humdrum life. It was by means of these letters, written on commercial cap, that the prisoner learned the rapid physical growth of little Manolo.
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