Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III HEREDITARY FOES The Alvaredas were the nearest neighbours of the Medranas—the nearest, the most hated. Ever since the day when, generations ago, a Medrana had thundered off with the wife of an Alvareda on his saddle-bow, and had defended his prize for years in his battlemented castle against the united chiefs of the outraged family, every Medrana had been reared in the belief that the sweetest blood in the world was that of an Alvareda, and every Alvareda had trained his children to thirst for the blood of a Medrana. Yet in the course of years the hereditary feud might have yielded to the influence of the somewhat gentler manners that the new centuries were bringing with them, and of the courtly habits that wereslowly replacing the mailed and helmeted life of the past, if the old hatred had not been suddenly and gratuitously revived some years previously to the opening of this story, by the action of the present owner of the Castle of Alvareda, who, on the wedding day of the present Medrana, had forced his horse into the church during the ceremony, clattered up to the altar, laid his hand on the bride as she stood there, and almost succeeded in renewing the feat of his ancestor's enemy. The days of private war were over; and the insult was wiped out in a duel in which Don Luis, the victim of the outrage, was so seriously wounded that his life was for a moment despaired of. After that, the Lord of Alvareda had contented himself with seizing every opportunity that chance offered to injure his enemy at court and in private, till the latter, after the death of his wife, which occurred when Rosita was five, detaching himself more and more from the world, had locked himself up in his study, and given himself wholly to alchemistic research,alone in his old turreted home...