"This made me understand why he had not answered my letters. I had to
resort to Colonel Falcon as a source of news of him, and all the while
the reports kept getting more unfavorable and gloomy.

"After an absence of five months I returned to Madrid the same day
that the telegraph brought the news of the battle of Tetuan. I remember
it as if it were yesterday. That night I bought the indispensable
Correspondencia de Espana, and the first thing I read in it was the notice
of Telesforo's death. His friends were invited to the funeral the
following morning.

"You will be sure that I was present. As we arrived at the San Luis
cemetery, whither I rode in one of the carriages nearest the hearse, my
attention was called to a peasant woman. She was old and very tall. She
was laughing sacrilegiously as she saw them taking out the coffin. Then
she placed herself in front of the pall-bearers in a triumphant attitude
and pointed out to them with a very small fan the passage-way they were to
take to reach the open and waiting grave.

"At the first glance I perceived, with amazement and alarm, that she
was Telesforo's implacable enemy. She was just as he had described her to
me--with her enormous nose, her devilish eyes, her awful mouth, her
percale handkerchief, and that diminutive fan which seemed in her hands
the sceptre of indecency and mockery.

"She immediately observed that I was looking at her, and fixed her gaze
upon me in a peculiar manner, as if recognizing me, as if letting me know
that she recognized me, as if acquainted with the fact that the dead man
had told me about the scenes in Jardines Street and Lobo Street, as if
defying me, as if declaring me the inheritor of the hate which she had