After leaving the café Pablito was asked, not in words, but with a horrible face, whither they were going.
"Good; then as I pass by my home I will make myself look a bit shabbier."
They left the principal streets, not without Piscis stopping a minute at his abode to alter his attire, and then they proceeded to the other end of the town, where the working classes mostly lived. They stopped in a certain street, as dull as it was dirty, in front of a poor-looking house with a rough stone balcony. Pablito looked carefully all round, and then gave a long, low whistle with the skill which distinguished him in this acquirement. Then casting an anxious look at the oil-lamp burning fifty steps off, he said:
"If we could but put out this light."
The terrible Piscis was again to the fore. He stepped to the corner of the wall, and there extinguished the light with his stick, of course breaking the glass at the same time.
A woman's form then appeared upon the balcony. Pablito jumped up to the iron grating of the window, and thence climbed noiselessly on to the balcony. Piscis meanwhile kept guard at the corner, armed with his formidable stick. Who was the woman who happened just then to be the object of the attentions of the Sultan of Sarrio? "The fair Nieves," those will reply who have followed the course of this story. Well, although we do not wish to run counter to the perspicacity of our readers, truth obliges us to declare that the young woman was not the fair Nieves, but the fair Valentina.
What! that prim needlewoman so averse to young gentlemen, and who, moreover, was betrothed to a young man named Cosme?
The same in body and soul, with her golden curls upon her forehead, her piquant frown, and her nose a little turned up. Pablito was the man to cause this sort of upset. While he was courting, or pretending to court Nieves, he was trying the ground with Valentina. But she was more obdurate than the other. The first kiss that he gave her upon the neck was when she was drinking some water in the kitchen. The angry embroideress called it disgraceful; she turned as red as a cherry, her expressive eyes shone with rage, and she cried:
"Take care, for I won't stand such ways! Get along, and try them on with those that like them."