eep much last night."

"Maybe you were out having a good time?"

"No. On the contrary, I cried all night."

There was such a depth of manly pain in this reply that Canamares did
not dare probe the matter any further.

The dissecting-room, cold and white, produced some very lively
sensations in Darles. Floods of sunlight fell from the tall windows,
painting a wide, golden border over the tiled walls. A good many corpses
lay on the marble tables, covered with blood-stained sheets; and all
these bodies had shaven heads and open mouths. Their naked feet, closely
joined together, produced a ghastly sensation of quietude. An
indefinable odor floated in the air, a nauseating odor of dead flesh.
Darles felt a slight vertigo which forced him to close his eyes and
leave the room. For more than an hour he wandered about the
gravely-echoing, spacious cloisters of San Carlos. A strange sadness
hovered over the building; the damp, old building which once on a time
had been a convent and now had become a school--the building where the
vast tedium of a science unable to free life from pain was added to the
profound melancholy of a religion which thinks only of death.

When Pascual Canamares left his classroom, he asked Darles to go and
dine with him. Enrique accepted. It was just noon. Canamares usually ate
at a little tavern in the Plaza de Anton Martin. This was a gay little
establishment, with high wooden counters, painted red. The two students
sat down before a table, on which the hostess had spread a little
tablecloth.

"Well, what do you want?" asked Canamares.

"Oh, I don't care. Anything you do."

"Soup and stew?"

"All right."

Canamares ordered, in a free and easy way:

"Landlady! Bring us a stew!"

He was a big, young fellow, twenty, plump and full-blooded, vivacious
with that healthy, turbulent kind of joviality which seems to diffuse
vital energies all about it. He was very talkative; and in his
picturesque and frivolous chatter lay a contagious good-humor. Darles
answered him only with distrait monosyllables. His whole attention was
fixed on a few coachmen at the next table. They were talking about a
certain crime that had been committed that morning. Two men, in love
with the same woman, had fought for her with knives, and one had killed
the other. The murderer had been captured. It was a vulgar but intense
crime of passion; it seemed to have a certain barbarous charm which, in
its own way, was chivalric,