“Lucía?”
“I wager you do not know what I am thinking of?”
“You will tell me.”
“The things that have been happening to me since yesterday are so strange, and the life I have been leading so out of the usual course—what you told me there—beside the pond, seems to me so singular, so extraordinary, that I am wondering whether I did not fall asleep in Miranda de Ebro and have not yet awakened. I must be still in the railway-carriage; that is to say my body must be still there, for my soul has flown away and is dreaming such wild dreams—against my will.”
“I don’t know what there is that is strange in anything that has happened to you; on the contrary, it is all very commonplace and simple. Your husband is left behind on the road. I meet you afterward by chance, and stay with you to take care of you until he arrives. Neither more nor less. Let us not weave a romance out of this.”
Artegui spoke with the same slow and disdainful intonation as usual.
“No,” persisted Lucía, “it is not what has happened to me that I find strange. What I find strange is—you. Come, Don Ignacio, you know it very well. I have never before seen any one who thinks as you think, or who speaks as you speak. And therefore, at times,” she murmured, taking her head between her hands, “the idea comes to me that I am still dreaming.”
Artegui rose from his chair and drew near the fire. His manly figure loomed up in the glowing light, and to Lucía, from her seat on the floor, he looked taller than he really was.
“It is right,” he said, inclining himself before her, “that I should ask your pardon. I am not in the habit of saying certain things to the first person I meet, and still less to persons like you. I have talked a great deal of nonsense, which naturally frightened you. Besides being out of place, my conduct was in bad taste and even cruel. I acted like a fool and I am sorry for it, believe me.”
Lucía, lifting up her face, looked at him in silence. The glow of the fire turned her chestnut hair to gold, and cast a rosy hue over her countenance. The eyes she raised to his, as he stood looking down at her, were shining brightly.