“Since the very first word you spoke, I felt sure that you knew me,” she murmured.
Mechanically she set down her glass. But she suddenly made haste to drain it, and then looked at her companion with an expression of unfathomable amazement.
“But who are you?... Who can you be?... Who are you?”
At the first question she leaned closer to Robledo, but then she drew back as though afraid to touch him, and as she repeated the question she raised her hands to her breasts as though making a painful effort to awaken her memory. Finally, in a discouraged tone, she repeated,
“But there have been so many men in my life!”
Suddenly a look of anxiety came into her eyes, followed by fear and then the expression of a frightened animal. She was afraid of the man sitting opposite her.
“I know you now,” she murmured. “Yes, it’s you all right. You’ve changed, but it’s still you. But I’d never have known you if you hadn’t mentioned what you did.”
Then she seemed to take courage, and looked long at him without any signs of fear. At last she added hoarsely,
“It would have been better if we had never met again!”
They sat in silence for several minutes. Elena seemed to have forgotten the existence of the bottle that she was still caressing mechanically. But finally the Spaniard’s curiosity broke into this silence.