"
His good wife was uneasy. She had felt alarmed without knowing exactly
why at the senator's solemn appearance; with that feminine instinct
which perforates all masculine precautions, she surmised some hidden
mission. She had noticed, too, that Rene and his father were talking
together in a low tone, with repressed emotion.
Moved by an irresistible impulse, she hovered near the closed door,
hoping to hear something definite. Her wait was not long.
Suddenly a cry . . . a groan . . . the groan that can come only from a
body from which all vitality is escaping.
And Dona Luisa rushed in just in time to support her husband as he was
falling to the floor.
The senator was excusing himself confusedly to the walls, the furniture,
and turning his back in his agitation on the dismayed Rene, the only one
who could have listened to him.
"He did not let me finish. . . . He guessed from the very first
word. . . ."
Hearing the outcry, Chichi hastened in in time to see her father
slipping from his wife's arms to the sofa, and from there to the floor,
with glassy, staring eyes, and foaming at the mouth.
From the luxurious rooms came forth the world-old cry, always the same
from the humblest home to the highest and loneliest:--
"Oh, Julio! . . . Oh, my son, my son! . . ."
CHAPTER V
THE BURIAL FIELDS
The automobile was going slowly forward under the colorless sky of a
winter morning.
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