The sun was sinking rapidly in the west, the garden was in shadow, Sardiola, the faithful watch-dog who had given the alarm, was no longer there. Lucía looked around with wandering gaze, and put her hand to her throat, as if she were strangling. Then she fixed her eyes on the house opposite as if by some magic art its walls of stone could transform themselves into walls of glass, and disclose to her what was within. She gazed at it fascinated, suppressing the cry that rose to her lips. The dining-room door stood ajar. This was not unusual, the nurse Engracia frequently standing at its threshold of an afternoon to breathe the fresh air and chat awhile with Sardiola; but there was something now in the aspect of the half-open door that froze Lucía’s heart with terror, and at the same time filled her soul with ardent joy. Through her brain, incapable of thought, ran the refrain, with the monotonous regularity of the ticking of a clock:
“He came this morning; he is going away to-night.”
Then, her nerves irritated by this iteration, the sounds blended confusedly together and she heard clearly only the last word of the refrain--“night, night, night,” which seemed to sink and swell like those luminous points that we see in the darkness during sleepless hours, which approach and recede, without apparent change of place, by the mere vibration of their atoms. She pressed her temples between her hands as if she sought to arrest the movement of the persistent pendulum, and rising, walked slowly, step by step, toward the vestibule of Artegui’s house. As she put her foot on the first step of the stairs, there was a buzzing in her ears like the humming of a hundred gadflies, that seemed to say:
And another voice, low and mysterious, like the voice of the wind among the dry boughs of the plane tree, murmured in a prolonged whisper:
She mounted the steps. When she reached the second step she stumbled forward, tripping on the hem of her merino dressing-gown, which she now noticed, for the first time, not only bore the traces of her attendance in the sick room, but was both ugly and of an unfashionable cut. She noticed, too, that her cuffs were limp and wet with the tears she had lately shed, and on her skirt were bits of thread, evidences of her sewing. She passed both hands over her dress, mechanically brushing off the threads, and smoothed out her cuffs as she went toward the door. Here she hesitated again, but the semi-obscurity that now reigned gave her courage. She pushed open the door and found herself in a large and gloomy apartment--the dining-room, whose dark, leather-covered walls, high presses of carved oak, and chairs of the same wood, gave it an air of still greater gloom.
