luminate her whole face, to change into
a smile on the tyrannical line of her lips.

"When?" he repeated.

Without knowing why, the student was afraid; but almost at once he
gathered himself together.

"Tell me, tell me, when?" he stammered.

"I don't know."

"You've got to tell me!"

"You're crazy!"

"No matter, tell me, when?"

Insidiously she replied:

"Never. Or--when you bring me the necklace I asked you for!"

Struck dumb, he peered at her, because he realized the girl meant what
she said. She added:

"Then----"

The door closed. Enrique Darles blundered, weeping, down the staircase.

IV

Darles got up next morning very early and went wandering out into the
street. He was completely done up. The night had been one of terror and
insomnia; and when day had dawned, finding him in his miserable little
room--a room whose only furniture was a bureau covered with books and
magazines, a rickety pine table and a few rush-bottomed chairs, all mean
and old--the realization of his solitude had struck him with the
violence of a blow. He had felt that profound agitation which
psychologists call "claustrophobia," or the fear of enclosed spaces.

For a long time he wandered about, absorbed in vacillations that had
neither name nor plan. He hardly knew himself. His conscience had been
cruelly wrung in a few hours of suffering; and from this savage
convulsion of the soul unsuspected developments were emerging, enormous
moral unfoldings, filled with terrifying perplexities. His despair had
loosed a stupendous avalanche of problems against the bulwark of those
moral principles which had been taught him as a child. And each of these
questions was now a terrible problem for him. Where, he wondered, does
virtue end? Where does sin commence? And if all our natural forces
should go straight toward the goal of happiness, why should there be any
desires that codes of formulated ethics should judge depraved and
sinful? Why should not everything which pleases be allowed?

When he reached the Calle de Atocha, he met a friend of his, called
Pascual Canamares. This friend was a medical student like himself. The
two young fellows greeted each other. Canamares was on his way to San
Carlos.

"Do you want to come along with me?" he asked. "I'll show you the
dissecting-room."

Darles went along with his friend. Canamares noticed Enrique's pallor.

"You don't look a bit well this morning," said he.

"No, I didn't sl