he had worked so long. An inner voice seemed asking
him: "What can have become of all this?"

He also thought about his house. He mentally built up again its facade,
beheld its balconies and evoked the appearance of each room. His memory,
clouded by the grim and brutalizing life of the prison, had never dipped
so profoundly into the past, nor had it ever brushed away the dust from
his old memories and so clearly reconstructed them. He thought about his
son, about Rafaela and Manolo Berlanga, seeming to behold their faces
and even their clothing just as they had been long ago; and he felt
surprised that revocation of the silversmith's face should produce no
pain in him. At that moment and in spite of the irreparable injury which
had been done him, he felt no hatred of Berlanga. All the rancor which
until then had possessed him seemed to sink down peacefully into an
unknown and ineffable emotion of pity and forgetfulness. The poor
convict once more examined his conscience, and felt astonished that he
could no longer find any poison there. May it not be, after all, that
liberty reforms a man?

At Jativa a man got into the car, a man already old, whose face seemed
to the former engineer to bear some traces of a friendly appearance. The
new-comer also, on his side, looked at Zureda as if he remembered him.
Thus both of them little by little silently drew together. In the end
they studied each other with warm interest, as if sure of having
sometime known each other before. Amadeo was the first to speak.

"It seems to me," said he, "that we have already seen each other
somewhere, years ago."

"That was just what I was thinking, myself," answered the other.

"The fact is," went on the engineer, "I'm sure we must have talked to
each other, many times."

"Yes, yes!"

"We must have been friends, sometime."

"Probably."

And they continued looking at each other, enwrapped by the same thought.
Zureda asked:

"Have you ever lived in Madrid?"

"Yes, ten or twelve years."

"Where?"

"Near the Estacion del Norte, where I was an employee."

"Say no more!" exclaimed Zureda. "I worked for the same company, myself.
I was an engineer."

"On what line?"

"Madrid to Bilbao."

Slowly and silently memories began to rise and group themselves together
in the enormous, black forgetfulness of those twenty years. Amadeo
Zureda took out his tobacco-box and offered tobacco to his companion.
Whatever seemed to have been lacking