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Suddenly she turned her head with an inquisitive air, graceful and fascinating; and the student received full in the eyes the shock of two large, green, luminous pupils living emeralds, indeed. Her scrutiny of him was short, searching and curious; it changed to an expression of scorn. Darlés flushed red and began to tremble. He let the curtain fall, and took refuge at the rear of the outer box.
The student felt calmer. One of the women had a water-jug. "Give me a drink!" stammered Enrique. "Water! I'm dying of thirst!" He raised the lip of the jug to his mouth, and drank in huge swallows. The women kept saying: "You're wounded. Poor man! You'd better hurry to the hospital!" To avoid waking suspicion, Darlés answered: "Yes, I'm on my way there, now."
And the poor student, reflecting how the girl would always remember that an honorable man had gone to jail for love of her, thought himself both happy and well-paid. Absorbed in these chimerical fancies, Enrique Darlés came to the jeweler's shop in Calle Mayor. Its lights had just been turned on, and now they flung bright radiance across the sidewalk.
"You don't look a bit well this morning," said he. "No, I didn't sleep much last night." "Maybe you were out having a good time?" "No. On the contrary, I cried all night." There was such a depth of manly pain in this reply that Cañamares did not dare probe the matter any further. The dissecting-room, cold and white, produced some very lively sensations in Darlés.
She did as the student bade her in his eagerness not to die before seeing his gift in the well-beloved's hands of snow and pearl. Under some papers her fingers came upon a black pearl necklace. "Oh, how beautiful!" she cried, enchanted. Without opening his eyes, and like a man talking in his sleep, Darlés answered: "It's not the one you wanted, I know. I found that out, afterward.
The young woman's self-possession was quite English in its cool perfection as she lighted up and fell to smoking, with one leg crossed over the other. She leaned her shoulders against the dun-hued back of the divan. And now, all about her diabolical, reddish-gold hair, the cigarette-smoke mounted thinly on the quiet air, and wove blue veils. Darlés observed her, from the corner of his eye.
She felt that she had shown a generosity, a fanciful whim such as perhaps might have driven a critic like Sarcey, after forty years of the real theater, to some miserable little puppet-show. At all events the thing should never happen again. It was absurd! Next day, Teodora had informed her that Darlés had come to see her while she had been out. Day after day, the same thing had occurred.
Such marks of attention usually fill men of the world with pride and complacency. But they disturb young lovers. According to the temperaments of such youthful blades, public recognition of this kind excites jealousy or shame. Enrique Darlés felt suppressed and ill at ease. A wave of hot blood burned in his cheeks.
Don Manuel glanced about him, with a kind of arrogant ease. Two or three times he murmured: "I'm waiting for somebody." Then he began to talk to the student again, asking him about his father and the political boss of the home town. Darlés kept on answering every question just the same way: "No change, down there. Everything's all right."
Lukewarm temperaments, undecided and ready to fit into any situation, look to me like half-season clothes that are always disagreeable. In summer they're too warm and in winter too cold." Darlés ventured to say with some timidity: "What's the reason you're put out to-day?" "I don't know." "What?" "It's true. Unless it might be "
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