the corridors again and bells began to
ring. A flood of spectators began to fill up the seats. The third act
was going to begin. Alicia and Don Manuel got up.

"Going to stay?" the deputy asked Darles.

"No, thanks."

"Why not?"

"Because--well, I've got to go to bed early. To-morrow I'm going to get
up early."

He felt so sure that Alicia might be able to love him, and so
overpowered by the happy embarrassment of this thought, that he wanted
to be alone, to enjoy it more fully. Don Manuel added:

"Well, suit yourself. Any time you want to see me, don't go to my house.
I'm never there. Better go to Alicia's. You'll find me there every
evening, from six to eight."

They took leave of each other. Enrique turned his head, as he left the
box, and his eyes met the girl's. Their look was a meeting of caresses,
as if they had given each other a kiss and made a rendezvous. It was one
of those terrible looks, capable of changing the whole current of a
man's life--a look such as a man will sometimes receive in his youth,
only to find it hounding and pursuing him his whole life long.

II

Next day, Alicia spent the evening before her fireplace, with a book.
Don Manuel's visit to her had ended in a quarrel, and he had gone. A
great nervousness possessed the girl; she wanted to cry, to yawn, to
pull out her hair, to kick the little cabinets from behind whose crystal
panes all kinds of little figurines, porcelain dolls and extravagant
bibelots peeped out with roguish faces.

No one who has never been really bored can grasp the complete horror,
the abysmal blackness, the silence like that of a bottomless pit or an
endless tunnel, which lies in absolute boredom. Still, just as death is
the beginning of life, so at times tedium can become a spring of
vigorous action. Many men have sown wild oats in their youth till they
have tired of them, and have in riper years become model husbands,
applied themselves to business and died leaving millions. Boredom
sometimes turns out works of art. Had not Heine and Byron been
monumentally bored, they could never have risen to the heights of song.

Now, though Alicia Pardo was very young, she already suffered from this
malady--the malady of quietude which rubs out boundary-lines and
extinguishes contrasts. Never yet had she been in love. The selfishness
of her lovers had in the end endowed her soul--itself little inclined to
tenderness--with all the hardness of a diamond.

"I