"Yes ..." said Golfin, "she must be left alone and hear no more talking."
"Then I am gone."
Pablo put out his hand and laid it on the head which seemed to his unaccustomed eyes the most terrible symbol of all human misery and wretchedness. Nela raised her eyes and fixed them on her master. Pablo felt as if they gazed at him from the depths of a tomb, so profound was their expression of sorrow and despair; then Nela freed one hand from beneath the coverings—a feeble, burning, rough little hand—and took that of the young man. At her touch Pablo shuddered from head to foot, and uttered a cry that came from his very soul.
There was a terrible pause—one of those lulls which precede the catastrophes of life as they do the convulsions of nature, as though to add to their solemnity.
Then, in a quavering voice that thrilled the by-standers with its tragical sadness, Nela spoke:
"Yes, Señorito mio," she said, "I am Nela."
Slowly, and as if she were lifting some too heavy weight, she raised her master's hand to her dry lips and kissed it—kissed it again—and then, with a third attempt, her lips remained motionless on the lad's hand.
They were all silent—looking at her. The first to break the silence was Pablo.
"Is this you ..." he said, "you...." And the thoughts that crowded on his mind checked his utterance of any. He would have liked to discover some new language in which to utter them, just as he had already discovered the two new worlds—of light, and of the love of external beauty. He could do nothing but look at her—look at Nela and remember that darkened world in which he had lived, his passions and the dreams and errors of his blindness all wandering and lost in its obscurity. Florentina, wiping away her tears, leaned over Nela to look into her face, and Golfin, watching her and knowing too well what he saw, exclaimed in a voice like a knell: