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One day Pedro Gomez, half-sleeping half-meditating as he sat on the stone bench beneath the hanging serpents that garnished the vestibule of Tres Hermanos, thought he saw a ghost upon the stairs which led from one corner of the wide court into which he had glanced, to the corridor of the upper floor. An apparition of Doña Feliz, he thought, had passed up them; and with ready superstition he decided in his own mind that some evil had befallen her in her journeyings. He was so disturbed by this idea that a few moments later, as her son Don Rafael passed through the vestibule, he ventured to stop him and tell him what he had seen; whereat Don Rafael burst into a loud laugh.
“What, do you not know,” he said, “that my mother has returned? Ah, I remember you were at Mass this morning. She came over from the post-house on donkey-back. A wonderful woman is my mother; but she knew we had need of her, and she came none too soon. I opened the door to her myself;” and Don Rafael hastened to his own apartments, where it was understood Doña Rita his wife hourly awaited the pangs of motherhood, and left Pedro gazing after him in open-mouthed astonishment.