emselves from their places into the arena in
their excitement, and the gay and superb actor bowed to them--bowed to
them again and again--Pepita sat like a little image of stone. She was
quite colorless, and her eyes were fixed. She seemed to hear and see
nothing until some one spoke to her. Then she rose and looked at Manuel.

"It is too hot," she said, in a low voice not like her own. "I must go.
The sun. I have a pain in my head. Come."

He had not lifted his eyes once to her. It was as if she had not
lived--as if she had been Isabella or Carmenita--and he did not give her
a thought. No, he had not once looked up.

The next day he was gone. She heard Jose say so to Jovita, who grumbled
loudly. She had forgotten her old distaste for these "fine ones."

"And but for her humors he would have stayed," she said. "What more does
she want than a fine well-built man like that--a man who is well-to-do,
and whom every other girl would dance for joy to get? But no; nothing
but a prince for her. Well, we shall see. She will work for her bread
herself at last, and serve the other women who have homes and husbands."

In the middle of the night she was wakened from her slumbers by
something--she knew not what. Soon she perceived it was Pepita,
trembling.

"What is it now?" demanded the old woman.

"I stayed out in the dew too long," said Pepita, "and I am cold."

"That is well," said Jovita. "Get chilled through and have a fever, that
we may ruin ourselves with doctors' bills; and all because you choose to
remain in the night air when you should be asleep."

Pepita lay on her pillow, her eyes wide open in the darkness, her small
hot hand clutching against her breast something she had hung round her
neck by a bit of ribbon. It was the _devisa_ she had stolen from Jovita,
and which had not been thrown away at all. In the daytime it was hidden
in the bosom of her dress; at night it hung by a cord and her hand held
it. By this time a sort of terror had mingled itself with her passion of
anger and pain, and she lay trembling because she was saying to herself
again and again:

"I am like Sarita! I am like Sarita!"

She said it to herself a thousand times in the weeks and months which
followed, and which seemed to her helplessness like years. She said it
in as many moods as there were hours of the day. Sometimes with wild
unreasoning childish rage; sometimes with a shock of fear; sometimes in
a frenzy of shame; sometimes, as s