The student
felt calmer. One of the women had a water-jug.

"Give me a drink!" stammered Enrique. "Water! I'm dying of thirst!"

He raised the lip of the jug to his mouth, and drank in huge swallows.
The women kept saying:

"You're wounded. Poor man! You'd better hurry to the hospital!"

To avoid waking suspicion, Darles answered:

"Yes, I'm on my way there, now."

Then he swallowed a few more mouthfuls, and fled toward the Calle de
Segovia. He ran a long, long time, till his last strength was gone. He
stopped then, and gathered his wits together. His wet clothes were glued
to his body, giving him a disagreeable feeling of cold. His hands were
red. What he had believed to be sweat, was blood.

"I'm wounded!" he murmured.

Then he understood what the women at Puerta Cerrada had told him. Just
at that moment a slight nausea overcame him, and he had to lean against
a wall. Presently he opened his eyes, and looked about him. He was in a
steep, deserted little alleyway, with humble houses on either hand. Very
near, looming up against the black immensity of the sky, appeared the
huge mole of El Viaducto--that splendid, sinister height, that bridge
spanning the city, whence so many a poor soul had bowed itself down to
death in the leap of suicide.

Enrique Darles began to think again:

"Yes, I'm really wounded."

His ideas became more coherent. He thought of Alicia, of his little room
in the Calle de la Ballesta. He felt of his pockets. His fingers closed
on the necklace--"Her necklace!"

The student smiled. Unspeakable joy soothed his troubled heart. He
sighed, and wiped away a few tears. Alicia was his! The book of his life
was written, was at an end.

V

Candelas and Alicia were coming back in a landau from the race-track.
The afternoon had been unseasonably chilly, but the sun had shone
brightly, and the races had been exciting. Alicia smiled, contented. She
had won eight hundred pesetas, and her eyes still beheld the jockeys
speeding with dizzy swiftness against the background of the April
landscape.

There suddenly, in the last half of the race, a horse had leaped ahead
from that party-colored group of red, blue and yellow blouses and of
white trousers. A horse had sped away to cross the tape; and she had
found herself a winner.

There was something personal, something flattering to her vanity, in
this triumph.

"The count's jockey rides like a centaur," she exclaimed. "He's English,
isn't