ll this I remember nothing, until I awoke, in total darkness, as
if out of a heavy confused dream, and felt that I was lying in a soft
eider-down bed. Little by little all that had passed dawned upon my
recollection, and I comprehended that I had been put to bed in one of
the guest-chambers in the neighbouring house.

While I lay pondering over this, and feeling intensely unhappy, the
elder Senor Martinez came in with a candle in his hand to look after me.
It then appeared that it was past two o'clock in the morning, and to the
circumstance that I had thus slept six or seven hours in succession I
probably owed the fact that I no longer felt any physical indisposition;
but morally I suffered all the more from a feeling of shame.

As far as I could understand, as I dressed myself, the house had been
turned into a perfect lazaretto for the same class of fallen after
dinner as myself, and among them I noticed, with a kind of revengeful
joy, Gram the clerk, my hump-backed mischievous neighbour.

Senor Martinez made known to me, by all kinds of spirited
gesticulations, that dancing was now going on briskly, and that I must
join the dancers.

The thought that Susanna must have come long ago, and must have been
waiting in vain, shot like lightning through my mind. How I could have
forgotten her, though even for an instant, was a riddle; but the fact
that I had done so weighed heavily upon me.

The dining-room was now transformed into a ball-room, and dancing had
already been going on merrily for several hours to the sound of violin,
clarionet, and violoncello. At an opportune moment, in the middle of a
dance, I slipped in unnoticed.

At first, as I stood in my tight white kid gloves, pale and embarrassed,
down by the open door through which the heat streamed out into the cold
passage like a mist, I suffered very much from the feeling that every
one would look at me and remember my unseemly behaviour.

Couple after couple glided past, so near that the ladies' dresses
touched me, and gradually I began, as far as my near sight would allow,
to find my bearings in the room.

The minister's wife sat on the sofa, farthest up among some elderly
ladies, in earnest conversation with the little bald doctor.

The minister was probably playing cards downstairs; but of Susanna I saw
nothing.

At the upper end of the room, young Martinez, with a beaming face, was
just dancing a polka with a strikingly beautiful girl dressed in whit