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Poor Enrique! The unfortunate boy, she pondered, was one of those luckless ones who never realize their dream, even though they lay down their lives for it. At last, moved more by a feeling of tenderness than by any artistic delicacy, she drew near the corpse, to say farewell with one last look. At the door, Candelas summoned her: "Let's be going! Come!" Alicia Pardo turned.
I spoke to him of his ill-fated accomplice Candelas; whereupon his face assumed a horrible expression. "I hope he is in torment," exclaimed the robber.
What about it?" "Oh, a jeweler's shop was robbed." "A jeweler's!" repeated Alicia. Her face assumed an expression of unspeakable anxiety and alarm. She remembered the emerald necklace she had spoken of, so often; and she remembered the evening, too, when Candelas and she had come across Enrique standing motionless in front of the shop window.
Then she peered at Alicia, as if asking whether this visit might not perhaps veil some amorous secret. The girl understood, and gave her friend's sophisticated question a vertical answer: "No, you're wrong. Enrique comes here only because he's Don Manuel's friend." The student nodded assent to this, and Candelas smiled coldly.
"But if he really did do it, I don't care! Let the fool suffer for it. Did I tell him to? When you come right down to it, even if I had, what the devil? The one that does a thing is more to blame than the one that asks him to!" The carriage stopped, and Alicia and Candelas got out. They made their way in under a poverty-stricken doorway. Candelas called: "Janitress! Janitress!" No answer.
She felt a proud, unhealthy emotion, like that of man when he meets his friends and they know some woman has killed herself for love of him. Candelas, who could read Alicia's thoughts, exclaimed: "Strange if the criminal were Enrique Darlés!" "I don't think it could be!" "Well, now it might." "That would be a terribly bad thing for him to have done." "Of course!"
Something in the rather scornful familiarity of her greeting infinitely humbled him. He grew pale. All the blood in his body seemed flooding his heart, turning to ice there. Still discourteous, Alicia introduced him to the other girl: "Señor Darlés my friend, Candelas." Candelas fixed her keen, vivid eyes on the new-comer.
"¿Quién sabe?" Sudden anger had endowed his face with virile and aggressive tension. Forehead and lips grew pale. Candelas, good-natured in a careless way, tried to salve his misery. "You'd better leave us women alone," said she. "We're a bad lot. Believe me, the best of us, the most saintly of us, isn't worth any man's sacrificing himself for."
At the end of the room, the silhouette of the bed was dimly visible. From that bed, Enrique Darlés stammered: "There, on the little table you'll find matches. Light the lamp." Candelas stood motionless, near the door, afraid of stumbling over something. When Alicia had made a light, the two friends cast a rapid glance about the room.
"Well then, come to the Teatro Real with me. They're going to give the divine Bizet's Carmen, and Nasi and Pacteschi are going to sing. Enough said!" Candelas accepted. "And now," said Alicia, "I want to go home, to see if any important message has come. Then I'll take you home, dear. You can change your dress and we'll go get Manuel, so he'll invite us out to supper."
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