The house where my mother and grandmother had lived was burned down, and as their mode of life had been retired, after more than twenty years of change few even remembered their existence.

Indeed I only discovered one, an old woman whom I found living in extreme poverty, and who once had been my grandmother's servant and knew my mother well, although she was not in the house at the time of her flight to England.

From this woman I gathered some information, though, needless to say, I did not tell her that I was the grandson of her old mistress.
It seemed that after my mother fled to England with my father, de Garcia persecuted my grandmother and his aunt with lawsuits and by other means, till at last she was reduced to beggary, in which condition the villain left her to die.

So poor was she indeed, that she was buried in a public grave.

After that the old woman, my informant, said she had heard that de Garcia had committed some crime and been forced to flee the country.
What the crime was she could not remember, but it had happened about fifteen years ago.
All this I learned when I had been about three months in Seville, and though it was of interest it did not advance me in my search.
Some four or five nights afterwards, as I entered my employer's house I met a young woman coming out of the doorway of the patio; she was thickly veiled and my notice was drawn to her by her tall and beautiful figure and because she was weeping so violently that her body shook with her sobs.