As we rattled over the pavings, through the lighted streets, no one spoke. The lady leaned back in her corner. Opposite her Rodriguez hummed "Salve! dimora" and I beside him, sat strangely confused and inert, still as if in a dream.
I had not even noted the direction we were taking, until I found that we had stopped in front of a French restaurant, one of the few Bohemian resorts the town boasted.
Rodriguez leaped out, assisted the lady, and I followed.
Just as we reached the top of the stairs, as I was about to follow them into one of the small supper rooms, like a flash, as if I were suddenly waking from a dream into conscious, with exactly the same sensation I have experienced many and many a morning when struggling back to life from sleep, I realized that the slender figure before me was as familiar as my own hand.
As the door closed behind us, I called her by name—and my voice startled even myself.
She threw back the hood of her cape and faced me.
Rodriguez had heard, too. He wheeled quickly toward us, as nearly broken from his self-control as a man so sure of himself could be.
Under the flash of our eyes the color surged up painfully in her pale face. There was much the same expression in our eyes, I fancy,—Rodriguez's and mine—but I felt that it was at his face she gazed.
I have never known how far it is given to woman to penetrate the mysteries of human nature, for she is gifted, it seems to me, with a dissimulation in which she wraps herself, as with an impenetrable veil of outward innocence, and ignorance, from our less acute perception and ruder knowledge.
There were speeches enough that it would have become a man in my position to make. I knew them all. But—I said nothing. Some instinct saved me; some vague fore-knowledge made me feel—I knew not why—that there was really nothing for me to say at that moment.