knives. At that moment the
old man saw in the face of the man he had believed his son, the same
expression of hate that twenty years ago had distorted the features of
Manolo Berlanga. Those eyes, that mouth all twisted into a grimace of
ferocity, that slim and feline body now trembling with rage, all were
like the silversmith's. The look of the father came back again in that
of the son, as exactly as if both faces had been poured in the same
mold.

And for the first time, after so long a time, the old engineer clearly
understood everything.

Annihilated by the realization of this new disaster, no longer having
any heart to defend himself, the wretched man let his arms fall. And
just at this moment Manolo, beside himself with rage, plunged the fatal
blade into his breast.

Now with his vengeance complete, the parricide took to flight.

Amadeo Zureda, dying, was carried to the hospital. There, that same
night, Don Adolfo came to see him. The good neighbor's grief was
terrible, even to the point of the grotesque.

"Is it true, what people are saying?" he asked, weeping. "Is it true?"

The wounded man had hardly strength enough to press his hand a very
little.

"Good-by, Adolfo," he stammered. "Now I know what I--had to know. You
told me, but I--couldn't believe it. But now I know you--were right.
Manolo was not--my son----"

* * * * *

THE NECKLACE

The first act was finished. Enrique Darles went down to the foyer. His
provincial curiosity drew him thither. He felt an eagerness to absorb
the vast, motley spirit of the city. He wanted to behold many things, to
school himself, strengthen himself with all these new impressions. Above
all he wanted to feel the life-currents of Madrid beating about his
migratory feet.

A few minutes before he had been sitting up there in the "peanut
gallery" of the Teatro Real. And from that vulgar place he had beheld
the theater with its vast ranges of seats and its boxes all drenched
under the blinding dazzle of hundreds of electric lights. The theater
had looked to him like some rare and beautiful garden; or maybe it had
been a kind of gigantic nosegay, where the sparkling diamonds on women's
throats had seemed dew-drops caught on great silk petals, on glossy
velvets, on white, bare shoulders.

So entirely absorbed had he been in this spectacle that he had hardly
paid any attention at all to what the orchestra and the actors had been
ab