Tito Gil was a poor boy, tall, thin and sallow, with great black eyes, and a frank, open face; badly dressed and awkward, but possessed of a bright happy disposition. At the time our story opens, he was about nineteen years of age; the son, nephew, grand-nephew, cousin and Heaven knows what more, to the best of the old Court shoemakers. His mother, Crispina Lopez, died in giving him birth, and her husband, Juan Gil, did not regard the child with much affection until he learned that he might be left a widower, from which it may be inferred that the poor shoemaker and Crispina Lopez were an example of brief but bad marriages. Nevertheless, and judging only from appearances Crispina Lopez deserved to be more sincerely mourned by her husband; for when she left the paternal roof, she brought him as "dot," an almost exceptional beauty, abundance of clothes and house-linen and, -- a very wealthy customer, nothing less than a Count, the Count of Rionuevo, who for some months had had the extraordinary caprice of covering his small delicate feet with the good Juan's rough work. This naturally caused gossip, which however at present has nothing to do with my story; but what is important for us to know is, that at the age of fourteen, on discovering Tito to be a good cobbler, the noble Count of Rionuevo, either pitying his orphanhood, or attracted by his winning ways (no one really understood exactly why), brought him to his own palace as page after much opposition on the part of the Countess, who had heard of the child born to Crispina Lopez. Tito had received some instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic and Christian doctrine, so that he was soon able to commence the study of Latin under a friar who was a frequent visitor at the Count's home. It may truly be said that these years were the happiest of his life, not because he lacked troubles (for the Countess took pains to remind him constantly of the shoemaker's awl and strap), but because he accompanied his protector every evening to the palace of the aged Duke of Monteclaro, whose daughter, sole heiress to all his vast possessions, was extremely beautiful, although the child of a very ugly and ungainly father. Elena had seen but twelve summers when she first met Tito; and as the poor page passed for the son of a noble, but ruined family (pitiful lie of Count Rionuevo), the aristocratic girl did not disdain to engage in childish games with him, playfully calling him "fiancé," and perhaps sometimes allowing an embrace, when her twelve years had changed to fourteen, and his fourteen to sixteen.

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