"Have no fear," he said. "The print only wants a few touches to alter the face beyond recognition. I will make them. Have no fear."
She was no longer listening to him. She gazed at the photograph with all her concentrated attention and murmured:
"I was twenty years old…. I was living in Italy. Dear me, how happy I was on the day when it was taken! And how happy I was when I saw my portrait!… I used to think myself pretty in those days…. And then it disappeared…. It was stolen from me like other things that had already been stolen from me, at that time—"
And, sinking her voice still lower, speaking her name as if she were addressing some other woman, some unhappy friend, she repeated:
"Florence…. Florence—"
Tears streamed down her cheeks.
"She is not one of those who kill," thought Don Luis. "I can't believe that she is an accomplice. And yet—and yet—"
He moved away from her and walked across the room from the window to the door. The drawings of Italian landscapes on the wall attracted his attention. Next, he read the titles of the books on the shelves. They represented French and foreign works, novels, plays, essays, volumes of poetry, pointing to a really cultivated and varied taste.
He saw Racine next to Dante, Stendhal near Edgar Allan Poe, Montaigne between Goethe and Virgil. And suddenly, with that extraordinary faculty which enabled him, in any collection of objects, to perceive details which he did not at once take in, he noticed that one of the volumes of an English edition of Shakespeare's works did not look exactly like the others. There was something peculiar about the red morocco back, something stiff, without the cracks and creases which show that a book has been used.
It was the eighth volume. He took it out, taking care not to be heard.