s are on you. You must feel them. You have not
forgotten. No. And it is Pepita--Pepita!"

All the strength of her body and soul she threw into her gaze--all the
fire of her young wildly beating heart and throbbing pulses.

"You must hear," she said. "Pepita! Pepita!"

And unconsciously she leaned forward so that her white face and great
eyes, and the little black head with the rose burning in its hair, stood
out among the faces of those about her.

And he looked up and saw her, and their eyes met; and without knowing
she started to her feet.

No one knew, no one but herself saw, how it happened: even she did not
understand until all was past. Their eyes met, as they had done on the
day a year before. No, not as they had done then, but with a strange
new look. Sebastiano started; the arena swam before him; there was a
second--a fatal second in which he saw only a small face without color
and the red rose which was the color of blood. Then there was a roar
near him--a roar among the people--a wild shriek from the women. The
bull was upon him; he made a misstep, and was caught, amid the shrieks
and bellows, and flung inert far out upon the hoof-trodden dust with the
blood pouring from his side.

"But," they said in the wine-shops at night, "when they took him up,
though they thought him gasping in death, he had not lost himself; and
as they carried him out they came upon a girl--the one who is called
'the pretty sister of Jose'--her brother was taking her away. She looked
like one dead three days; and Sebastiano--there is a man for you!--tore
the _devisa_ from his shoulder and dropped it at her feet; and she
snatched it up--all wet with his blood--and thrust it in her breast, and
dropped like a stone. It is said that he loved her, and she had a devil
of a temper and treated him badly. He is a good fellow--her brother
Jose--and wept like a child for Sebastiano, and has begged to be allowed
to nurse him, and Sebastiano will have it so."

"I am strong as an ox," Jose had said, weeping. "I can watch like a dog.
I want neither sleep nor food, if it comes to that; and once when one of
my comrades fell from a scaffold I was the only one who could nurse him
without killing him with the pain. He will tell you that I nursed him
well, and was never tired."

"Let him stay," said Sebastiano.

In his struggle with death, which lasted so long, it was always the
large form and simple, anxious face of Jose he saw when he knew wha