What was it? What had passed?
He remained some instants looking at Martita, while he slowly collected his ideas. At last he decided to speak to her. The girl lifted her face which was flushed and disturbed.
"Did I not just cry out?"
Martita grew still more flushed and disturbed, and scarcely could she answer in trembling voice,—
"No.... I heard nothing."
Ricardo looked at her steadily and with surprise: "Why was that girl blushing so?"
"I was asleep, but I would take my oath that I cried out ... and I would also take my oath—such a strange thing!—that you gave me a kiss."
Marta's color, when she heard these words, suddenly changed from rosy to pale, betraying a profound consternation. Her tremulous hands could not hold her crochet work, and dropped it in her lap. At the same time her eyes rested on Ricardo with such an expression of fear, of tenderness, of supplication, of dismay, that he felt a strong shock, like that caused by an electric discharge.
It was the same look—the same that he had just seen in his dream.
He felt himself inundated by a great light, a divine light. At that supreme moment he saw everything, he comprehended all. The mist that blinded his eyes faded away, and he saw himself face to face with the scene in the garden, when Marta seemed so offended because he kissed her hands ... and he saw and comprehended. The strange dismay following that scene he likewise saw and comprehended. Then he went back in imagination to the beach on the island. The sun pouring floods of light over the sand; the blue and white waves girdling a peninsula where two young people had been long sitting; the sob which broke the silence of the tunnel; then a girl falling into the water, and a young man plunging in after her and saving her. "Thanks, Señor Marqués, it is not so bad down below there." This also he saw, he comprehended. Then a sudden and extraordinary estrangement: a pair of eyes that did not look at him, two lips that did not speak to him, a pair of hands that did not touch him.