It was but a half-heart resolve, and failed me on the following day.
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 _role_ 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.