Again did I traverse the Calle del Obispo; again scrutinise the windows of the stuccoed mansion.
As on the day before, the jalousies were down, and my surveillance was once more doomed to disappointment. There was no face, no form, not even so much as a finger, to be seen through the screening lattice.
Shall I go again?
This was the question I asked myself on the third day.
I had almost answered it in the negative: for I was by this time getting tired of the profitless rôle I had been playing.
It was perilous too. There was a chance of becoming involved in a maze, from which escape might not be so easy. I felt sure I could love the woman I had seen in the window. The powerful impression her eyes had made upon me, in twenty seconds of time, was earnest of what might follow from a prolonged observation of them. I could not calculate on escaping without becoming inspired by a passion.
And what if it should not be reciprocated? It was sheer vanity, to have even the slightest hope that it might be!
Better to give it up—to go no more through the street where the fair vision had shewn itself—to try and forget that I had seen it.
Such were my reflections on the morning of the third day, after my arrival in the Angelic city.
Only in the morning. Before twilight there was a change. The twilight had something to do in producing it. On the two previous occasions I had mistaken the hour when beauty is accustomed to display itself in the balconies of La Puebla. Hence, perhaps, my failing to obtain a view of her who had so interested me.