“It is too hot,” she said, in a low voice not like her own. “I must go. The sun. I have a pain in my head. Come.”
He had not lifted his eyes once to her. It was as if she had not lived—as if she had been Isabella or Carmenita—and he did not give her a thought. No, he had not once looked up.
The next day he was gone. She heard José say so to Jovita, who grumbled loudly. She had forgotten her old distaste for these “fine ones.”
“And but for her humors he would have stayed,” she said. “What more does she want than a fine well-built man like that—a man who is well-to-do, and whom every other girl would dance for joy to get? But no; nothing but a prince for her. Well, we shall see. She will work for her bread herself at last, and serve the other women who have homes and husbands.”
In the middle of the night she was wakened from her slumbers by something—she knew not what. Soon she perceived it was Pepita, trembling.
“What is it now?” demanded the old woman.
“I stayed out in the dew too long,” said Pepita, “and I am cold.”
“That is well,” said Jovita. “Get chilled through and have a fever, that we may ruin ourselves with doctors’ bills; and all because you choose to remain in the night air when you should be asleep.”
Pepita lay on her pillow, her eyes wide open in the darkness, her small hot hand clutching against her breast something she had hung round her neck by a bit of ribbon. It was the devisa she had stolen from Jovita, and which had not been thrown away at all. In the daytime it was hidden in the bosom of her dress; at night it hung by a cord and her hand held it. By this time a sort of terror had mingled itself with her passion of anger and pain, and she lay trembling because she was saying to herself again and again:
“I am like Sarita! I am like Sarita!”