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What a splendid specimen! The race would not die out with her. She was like him, wholly like him; if he had been a woman, he would have been like his Milita. She kept on talking, without taking her arms from her father's shoulders, with her eyes, tremulous like molten gold, fixed on the master.
And the master went back with new affection to his companions, those merry youths, slandering and disrespectful as they were. He recognized talent in them all. The gossip about his extraordinary life reached even his daughter, with the rapid spread which anything prejudicial to a famous man acquires. Milita scowled, trying to restrain the laughter which the strangeness of this change aroused.
They attributed the nervous trouble to the birth and nursing of the child, that had broken her weak health; they suspected, too, the existence of some unknown cause that kept the sick woman in constant excitement. Renovales, who studied his wife closely in his eagerness to recover peace in his house, soon discovered the true cause of her illness. Milita was growing up; already she was a woman.
Milita submitted to her friends' caresses, carrying away her mother's tears on her veil. "Good-by, good-by, my daughter!" And the wedding was over. Renovales and his wife were left alone. The absence of their daughter seemed to increase the solitude, widening the distance between them.
Milita was running over from memory the list of friends of the family, prominent ladies who would not fail to honor her approaching marriage with some magnificent present. "Concha won't come," said the girl. "It's a long time since she has been here." There was a painful silence, as if the countess's name chilled the atmosphere.
She was dying without a protest! And he did not fall at her feet to beg her forgiveness! And he remained unmoved, without a tear, without a sigh! He was afraid to stay alone with her. Milita came back to stay at the house to care for her mother. The master took refuge in his studio; he wanted to forget in work the body that was dying under the same roof.
But she did not mean anything; the master knew that Milita and he treated each other like brother and sister. More than once when she was a little tot and he a lad, he had acted as her horse, trotting around the old studio with the little scamp on his back, pulling his hair and pounding him with her tiny fists. "She's very cute," interrupted Cotoner.
In his frequent visits to the artist's house, he finally felt attracted toward Milita; he saw in her the woman he wanted to marry. Lacking more sonorous titles, it was something to be the son-in-law of Renovales.
"For God's sake, Josephina," Renovales murmured with a troubled voice, "don't talk like that. Don't think of such outrageous things. I don't see how you can talk that way. Milita will hear us."
As a remedy for this isolation that filled them with misgivings they both thought of having the newly married couple come to live with them. The house was large, there was room for them all. But Milita objected, gently but firmly, and her husband seconded her. He must live near his coach house, his garage.
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