In a small shop in one of the pueblos blancos (white villages) near Seville, an old lady in black makes the sign of the cross as she asks God to bless the souls of the young couple shot at point-blank range by ETA. "And their poor children," she says, shaking her head sadly. Other people come in and know immediately what the conversation is about, for nobody is talking about anything else.
Jacinto, the shopkeeper, is almost in tears as he thinks about the suffering of the three children who have been left orphans. "I have to give my little girl dozens of kisses when I'm just going out for a few hours because she hates me to go. What are those little ones going to do?"
His wife, Catalina, voices the anger and sentiments which are mirrored in towns and villages all over Spain. She says she wants the death penalty brought back for terrorists. "Maybe they'd think twice about killing if they thought they were going to die themselves."
As they talk, the village church bell rings for a special Mass being held in memory of Alberto Jimenez Becerril and his wife, Asuncion Garcia.
The bells are ringing at precisely the same time as a gathering in the Seville street where the couple died, yards from where their children were sleeping.
People hurry through the teeming rain into the church, anxious, they say, to pay their respects and to do something which will relieve the impotence they feel in the face of such terrorist murders. "It is an unending nightmare," says one young town hall worker.
The killings took place in one of Seville's most visited and most beautiful neighbourhoods. The unnatural silence there today has been described as almost sepulchral, and the incessant rain as like the tears which all of Spain is crying.
Hundreds of people took part in a silent protest outside Seville town hall, their hands in white gloves raised above their heads.
It marked a change of mood in the beautiful city which had been celebrating the news that King Juan Carlos's daughter Elena was expecting the first royal grandchild.
Yesterday's shootings, the first outside the Basque region, challenge the government's argument that ETA violence is a Basque problem to be solved by Basques.