ng
girl did not once turn her eyes in that direction, though she often
looked toward a lower proscenium box, where there were a number of young
aristocrats.

Very far, therefore, from being discouraged, Utrilla was almost happy.
He would have been entirely so if, instead of having to keep account of
candles put out, he had been occupied in some more congenial business,
and had had the good fortune to have killed, or at least dangerously
wounded, some one in a duel. But up to the present time, unfortunately,
no favorable opportunity had presented itself. Still, he was waiting
anxiously for one, for, in truth, his conscience troubled him for being
now eighteen years old, and "never having once been into the field."

Of late he had begun to take lessons in the use of the foils at a
fencing-school, and in presence of the professor and his companions he
had made allusion to some deadly project which he had conceived, and
which, in our opinion could not have been anything else than the
riddance of his rival Don Alfonso.

Months passed, and at regular hours, with a constancy worthy of a more
fortunate result, Utrilla wore out the heels of his boots along the
sidewalks of the Calle Mayor.

Occasionally Julita would deign to greet him with a wave of the hand, in
answer to the energetic way in which her suitor took off his hat to her
from the street. Still, the greater number of times it happened that
when the brigadier's daughter caught sight of him looming around the
corner, she would hastily close the balcony, and this our young man took
as a sign of exquisite modesty and timidity at his penetrating glances.
The most that he felt called upon to say in complaint was:--

"This Julita--when will she cease being a mere child!"

The unshaken faith which he had in the fascinating virtue of his smile
and his genteel appearance was sufficient to sustain him in this
illusion; but it must be confessed that some help was given toward it by
the fact that Julita herself, though very mercifully, made use of him on
occasion, to wake Saavedra's jealousy, when she was vexed with him. And
sometimes at the theatre she would talk with him in the presence of the
_caballero_ himself.

This was the position of affairs when the bomb exploded; that is, when
Julita eloped that evening with her cousin. The first news of this that
Utrilla received was communicated to him by _la brigadiera's_ door-maid,
with whom he sustained cordial relations, st