"IT would be as well to put a light curb on her."

"Oh! a bit," returned Piscis gravely.

Both were silent for some minutes, then Pablito exclaimed:

"Confounded mare! I never in my life saw such a sensitive mouth."

"Like silk," returned his friend in a tone of profound conviction.

Another pause.

"Think we ought to give her more of the spur?"

"The spur is never amiss with any animal," growled Piscis in the same decided tone.

"We must train her in trotting."

"It would be just as well."

During these remarks the two inseparable equestrians walked right across the town from the other end, where they had been in conclave in Don Rosendo's stables. It was ten o'clock at night; the air soft and springlike. The few people about were hastening homeward, and the only shops now open were those of popular resort, such as Graell's, Marano's, and the like. In the Cabin there was a great deal of light and excitement. Pablito, who shared his father's resentment in the matter, said to his friend, as they passed the abhorred club:

"Piscis, throw a stone at the door and break the glass."

Thereupon Piscis, always aggressive, took up a flint from the road, waited for his friend to get round the corner, and then, zas! he flung it at the Cabin and shivered the windows to atoms. Then he took to his legs, and for fear of being recognized by those who came out in search of him, he ran away on all fours with wondrous agility.

There were also some people in the CafÉ de la Marina. They entered the place and quaffed in silence several glasses of chartreuse without its interfering with the active working of their brains.

On rising Pablito said:

"The best thing will be to put her in harness with Romeo."

"That is just what I was thinking," returned Piscis eagerly.

After leaving the cafÉ Pablito was asked, not in words, but with a horrible face, whither they were going.

"There."

"Good; then as I pass by my home I will make myself look a bit shabbier."

They left the principal streets, not without Piscis stopping a minute at his abode to alter his attire, and then they proceeded to the other end of the town, where the working classes mostly lived. They stopped in a certain street, as dull as it was dirty, in front of a poor-looking house with a rough stone balcony. Pablito looked carefully all round, and then gave a long, low whistle with the skill which distinguished him in this acquirement. Then casting an anxious look at the oil-lamp burning fifty steps off, he said:

"If we could but put out this light."

The terrible Piscis was again to the fore. He stepped to the corner of the wall, and there extinguished the light with his stick, of course breaking the glass at the same time.

A woman's form then appeared upon the balcony. Pablito jumped up to the iron grating of the window, and thence climbed noiselessly on to the balcony. Piscis meanwhile kept guard at the corner, armed with his formidable stick. Who was the woman who happened just then to be the object of the attentions of the Sultan of Sarrio? "The fair Nieves," those will reply who have followed the course of this story. Well, although we do not wish to run counter to the perspicacity of our readers, truth obliges us to declare that the young woman was not the fair Nieves, but the fair Valentina.

What! that prim needlewoman so averse to young gentlemen, and who, moreover, was betrothed to a young man named Cosme?

The same in body and soul, with her golden curls upon her forehead, her piquant frown, and her nose a little turned up. Pablito was the man to cause this sort of upset. While he was courting, or pretending to court Nieves, he was trying the ground with Valentina. But she was more obdurate than the other. The first kiss that he gave her upon the neck was when she was drinking some water in the kitchen. The angry embroideress called it disgraceful; she turned as red as a cherry, her expressive eyes shone with rage, and she cried:

"Take care, for I won't stand such ways! Get along, and try them on with those that like them."

By this she doubtless meant Nieves. Pablito proceeded more cautiously henceforth, but not with less audacity. He did not seem to object to her brusk manners; he joked with her, and he patiently bore with her spitfire ways, for Valentina was a type of the artisan in Sarrio whose want of culture seemed merely an additional charm. The trousseau of Ventura being finished, there were no more opportunities of meeting, so Pablito made use of the public balls to lay siege to her.

Not that he had abandoned Nieves. The gay young fellow guessed that the self-love excited by rivalry would do more in his favor than even the personal charms with which he was endowed. This perspicacity was innate in him, and had been clearly shown from the first time he paid attention to any of the fair sex, which is an additional argument for those who believe in the preexistence of the human being; because it could only be by having laid siege to several seamstresses in a previous state of existence that our young friend could have such clear ideas as to the course of action that would prove successful.

At last the conquest was made.

She began by giving up her young man, and she ended by making evening appointments like the present one with the gallant Pablito.

"Is your father asleep?" was the first question that he asked when he appeared on the balcony.

"What is that to you?" returned the severe seamstress.

"Well, if he is not asleep, you see, by jingo! the thing is serious."

"Hold your tongue, coward, or I will make it hot for you; I will make a disturbance for the pleasure of seeing you run."

Here Pablito caught her in his arms and kissed her effusively. The young girl smiled with delight, but she soon frowned, and her whole physiognomy expressed great displeasure.

"Go away, go away!" she said, pushing him off. "I have something to ask you. Where were you this morning?"

"This morning? In several places—at home, at the Club, in the stables, at the end of the landing-stage."

"Were you not in the Calle de San Florencio?"

"Yes, I passed by there two or three times."

"And whom did you meet there?"

"How should I know. Several people."

"Didn't you meet Nieves?" asked the pretty seamstress with suppressed rage.

"Why, yes, I did meet her," he returned in a careless tone.

"And you did not stop her?"

"No, I simply said good-day."

"Fool! hypocrite! prevaricator!" Valentina exclaimed with fury. "Take that, you ass!" giving him a terrible pinch on his arm. "You only said 'Good-day' to her, and yet you were a whole hour with her! Take that, you deceiver! Take that!"

Upon this she gave him so many pinches that the wretched Pablo was doubled up with pain, while powerless to utter a sound out of respect for the slumbers of the father of the vixenish girl.

"Stop, Valentina! for goodness' sake. You are indeed mistaken. I stopped a minute to ask her if she had finished hemming my handkerchief."

"It was no such thing! You stood there for a good hour together, laughing like mad! I felt inclined to strangle you with my own hands, you fool! you fool! you more than fool!"

The enraged girl, now maddened with fury, laid her hands on the neck of her adorer, as if about to strangle him.

Her heart, however, was touched at seeing such a handsome, fine young fellow with his eyes distended with terror; in fact, Valentina took pity on him and let him go, but not without giving his arms several additional pinches.

"You don't deceive me, you know; you don't deceive me! If I find that you are with her again I won't have anything more to do with you."

"All right, I promise not to speak to her any more; but don't go and believe the first story you hear about me."

"Will you promise?" asked the obdurate seamstress, looking at him in a relentless way.

"Never fear."

"Well, you will have to settle with me if you don't keep your word. Come."

This was the calm and tender mode of Valentina's dealings with the young swell of Sarrio; and when he gave Piscis, or any other friend, an account of them, he smiled like a man of the world, and declared that these irascible, imperious women are most attractive to men, especially if, like himself, they were somewhat bored.

After they had made peace, or, to speak more correctly, after Valentina had come to terms, there was a whispered conversation which lasted for some time. Then nothing more was heard, and one was led to suppose that the balcony was vacated. If it were not very ugly to cast a slur on a girl's reputation, one might have suspected that the loving couple had retired to the interior of the house.

Piscis meanwhile kept guard, walking up and down the street; and the fact was, he was not the only one so occupied, for a man had posted himself ever since their arrival in the corner of a doorway, where the shadows were darkest. Motionless and protected by the gloom, he was invisible to Piscis. Profiting by a moment when the back of the latter was turned to the house, the man issued from his hiding-place, and cautiously approached it. He looked at the balcony and hesitated a few seconds. This hesitation caused his failure. By the time he jumped up to catch hold of the bars the terrible Piscis turned and saw him.

With two strides he was under the balcony before the intruder could swing himself up to it, and his famous stick came down with such force on the shoulders of the poor man that he loosened his hold on the bars and measured his length with the street. The wrathful Centaur was about to repeat the blow, when the fellow jumped up with such agility and fled away so swiftly that the second blow struck the ground, and he did not attempt a third.

"Confound it!" cried Piscis.

This exclamation must have reached the ears of his happy friend, for a few seconds later he appeared on the balcony and swung himself into the street.

"What is it?" he asked, approaching his friend.

"A man."

"Where?" asked the cavalier, turning round two or three times.

"He has escaped now. I caught him just as he was about to scale the balcony, and I knocked him down with my stick. Then he took to his heels. By Jove! Romeo couldn't have beaten him in speed."

"This man," returned Pablito gloomily, "must be an old lover of Valentina's. What is to be done?"

"Then, if he be a lover, I don't know what he could be here for, unless it was to give you a licking."

Pablito threw his arm round his friend's shoulder, not to support himself, although his legs trembled somewhat, but to say, in a low voice:

"Do you think so?"

"One—or two, or three."

The handsome young man was silent. At the end of a minute he said:

"Do you know him?"

"I? No; and you?"

"I have never seen him; I only know that he is named Cosme, and that he is a barber."

They left the street in silence, and in silence they arrived at Belinchon's house. There, on taking leave of each other, Pablito said to his friend:

"If I go there again, which I doubt, will you do me the kindness not to lose sight of the balcony, eh?"

"I should rather think so," was the laconic reply of the indomitable Piscis.

The following day was Sunday, and the usual weekly ball took place at the school. They danced in the afternoon from three to seven. The room was spacious, having been built a few years before as a school for children. The benches were piled up on the teacher's platform; the walls were covered with maps and proverbs, and as the followers of Terpsichore danced the languid habanera, they could amuse themselves by reading a portion of the invaluable exhortations tending to show that virtue and labor are the true treasures of childhood: "The studious child will receive the reward of his industry;" "Truth and perseverance are superior to talents." And there at the end over the master's table was the image of Christ crucified (oh, blasphemy!), mounted on a silken background, in the presence of these wild polkas and voluptuous dances.

It was there that, without fear of rain or sun, strangers could court and admire the young girls of Sarrio. And, in truth, all the captains and pilots who visited the town took care to frequent the place. Occasionally their admiration led them to overstep the bounds of British gravity, and their fair beards came too near to the face of some beauty.

"Are you mad, Christian?" she would ask, as she pushed him away.

"Christian! Christian!" the Englishman repeated in astonishment. "What is being a Christian?"

"Goodness, man, don't you know the doctrine? Well, learn it then."

It would be about five or six in the evening, after four or five waltzes and as many polkas had been danced, that these ladies were so charming. The well-circulated blood tinged their cheeks with a bright color; their fair or dark locks, in pretty disorder, floated in the air or fell in adorable curls upon their shoulders; their eyes shone like stars in those heavenly faces, and those ruddy, luscious, half-opened lips revealed immaculate rows of teeth.

But enough, or we shall never finish; albeit in our admiration of the working-girls of Sarrio we are outdone by every Englishman who comes hither.

There was always a sameness in the feminine element of these balls, for it was entirely composed of young girls of the same rung of the social ladder. But there was a dangerous variety in the masculine element, for it consisted of the young gentlemen as well as the young artisans of Sarrio. Thus the artisans considered that their rights were encroached upon by the rival charms of the young gentlemen, and the repeated unequal marriages that took place in the town showed how they had been ousted.

As already remarked, the West Indians were generally satisfied with the somewhat poor and faded young ladies of the place, but the young men were more taken with the charms of the working-girls. Thus the poor artisans and sailors were outdone by the gentry. What were they to do?

They found some consolation in visits to the taverns, and in the use of their sticks, which made every ball the scene of a shower of blows, and two or three gentlemen generally left the school with broken heads on a Sunday.

Pablito had come off pretty well hitherto, thanks to his most faithful Piscis, who undertook to receive the blows intended for him. The only inconvenience he suffered at most of these gatherings was the loss of his hat, and this happened so repeatedly that he was quite certain that they picked a quarrel with him to make him lose it. When an artisan wanted a hat he knew how to get one.

But Piscis could not save him from the blows he received that Sunday; and this not from want of will on the part of the Centaur, but because there are things that really can not be done. With what care did that gallant youth twist the ends of his mustache before his looking-glass! How he dressed his cheeks with a cream he had sent for from Madrid, and what havoc was made of his toilet an hour afterward!

He walked across the room, looking so handsome and so attractive that it was a pleasure to see him as he cast his eyes from one side to another, as all men well versed in his accomplishments are prone to do. Occasionally on passing a young lady he would say, "Pretty as ever, Julia!" or else, "Your eyes are killing"; or, "Torquata, there's no one to come up to you in Sarrio," or any other remark flattering to a girl. But while saying these things he maintained his gravity of demeanor, as he was aware that it was one of his most irresistible charms.

He waited for Valentina for some time, but the room was full of ladies, and the brass orchestra had played two dances without the pretty seamstress making her appearance. The strains of a mazurka began, the gilded youth encircled the slender waists of the working-girls, but Pablito, faithful to the absent, stood idle, looking on at the swift couples as they passed before him.

The mazurka over, he began to think that Valentina would not come. In the sudden way he seized an idea he was very like his father, particularly when flushed with wine, so that in a few minutes he was quite convinced of the fact. This sudden fancy happened to be coincident with the entrance into the room of the fair Nieves. Their eyes met, and the poor girl, shamefully neglected for nearly two months, smiled sweetly at him. This sweetness had been precisely the cause of her failure, for the self-sufficient Pablito soon wearied of sweet women. Nevertheless, he returned the smile, and on coming to her side he said, teasingly:

"Are you going to frighten the bulls, Nieves?"

The embroideress wore a scarlet sash at her waist, and this remark of her ex-admirer so flustered her that she could not reply. She smiled again, and said, "Ah!" "Yes," "No," and uttered a few more words that we do not remember, and looked as if she would faint with emotion. The next time he came across her he asked if she would like to dance the first polka with him. "The first, the second, the third, and all the polkas in the world," returned Nieves, with trembling lips. Pablo was filled with remorse after having engaged himself for the polka. "What a fool, what a brute I am! And suppose Valentina comes in now!"

But she did not come. The orchestra struck up the opening bars, and the youth, without turning his eyes from the door, encircled the waist of the embroideress and dashed rapidly into the centre of the room. Other young people, no less rapid, dashed from the opposite side, and then ensued one shock, then another, and then another. Such collisions formed the chief attraction of these balls, and the young girls, instead of being angry at nearly losing their footing and having their hair tumbled, laughed with infinite pleasure. Pablo and Nieves, who could not take four turns without colliding with another couple, were perfectly charmed. Nevertheless, the young man felt his legs tremble whenever he passed the door, and he always left it as quickly as possible. When the orchestra had finished he took his partner to a corner of the room and then sat down a minute, and Pablito felt a spark of feeling glow in the ashes of his love for that girl so cheerful, so good-tempered, and so affectionate.

"Yes, I wanted to dance with you, Nieves," he said as he wiped his brow with his handkerchief.

"And I with you, Pablo."

"You?"

The girl blushed.

"Do you say you instead of thou now?"

"It is now so long ago."

"You are right. But see, I have not forgotten."

"On Wednesday I saw you—I saw you in the Nieva road—you were on a white horse."

"It was a mare."

"I thought it would throw you."

"Throw me!" exclaimed Pablito, slightly frowning. "It was a bit fresh, child; a mare does not throw me so easily."

"But it reared up so! It almost stood upright. Goodness, how frightened I was!"

"I was teaching it to step high," returned the youth, with a smile of superiority. "As she has not been worked before she resisted a bit. Sometimes her mouth seems too tender, but, taking her all round, Linda is a fine creature. Look here, when I bought her, or, rather, when I changed Negress—and she cost me over and above 1,500 reales—for her last October, she had a temper, indeed; she stuck in the middle of the road, she shied at the carts and carriages—in short, she was an impossible creature, and I said to myself: 'What is to be done with this mare?'"

Pablito, in whose heart the girl had touched a sensitive chord, talked long and brilliantly on his equestrian deeds. Nieves listened with rapturous delight, thinking that behind the minute description of Linda's peccadillos she was going to find her lost love.

But suddenly the orator (pof!) received a blow in the middle of his face, the listener (pof!) received another, and before they had recovered from their surprise they received two more—pof! pof!

The choleric Valentina was the author of this attack, and in less than a minute she had overwhelmed them with blows.

Pablito had nothing for it but to make his escape as gracefully as he could and retire to the street. Nieves remained like an innocent dove in the clutches of a vulture, until Valentina, seeing she could go no further, as her arms were seized by some of the party, quickly tore herself free, left the room, where the next dance was about to begin, and rushed into the street.

Pablito was walking slowly, still feeling quite stunned, when he felt a terrible pain in his arm. Being quite accustomed to that kind of torture, he said, without turning his head:

"Valentina!"

"It is I! Do you think you are going to make me a laughing-stock?"

"What you have just done is very ugly," replied the youth in an angry tone, and looking his beloved in the face. "You have made a scandal, and you have made me ridiculous. I will not tolerate that, do you hear?"

"You won't tolerate it? Well, look here, if I see you again with her I will not be contented with what I did to-day—I will strike at you both with a knife."

"But I won't allow you to do anything of the sort; neither will I have you speak to me when I am with another girl!" cried the young man, more and more infuriated.

"Not when I see you with that cat! We'll see about that, we'll see!"

Then the handsome youth, justly enraged and oblivious in his fury of all the laws of gallantry, discharged a blow at the face of his dear one, and then another, and then another, until, in fact, she had a regular buffeting. The pretty seamstress patiently submitted to this treatment of her admirer without evincing the slightest sign of resistance, nor even of avoidance of the blows. When Pablito had finished, she said, with delightful naturalness:

"Have you done now?"

"For the present, but I shall have to do it again!" roared the young man, blind with rage.

"Well, you can do it whenever you like, and I will bear it all without moving; but, beat me or not, I have told you what I shall do if I find you talking with her again. Now take me back to the ball."

"I don't want to."

"Very well; then take me somewhere else where I can put my hair straight, for you have quite disheveled it."

The youth had to obey, and so he escorted her to the Star CafÉ, thinking on the way that he had to pay rather dearly for his conquests.

A few days later he had still greater reason to come to that conclusion. It was at the MadrileÑa barber's where he frequently went to be shaved and have his hair cut.

Accompanied by his chief equerry, he had entered the place and taken a seat on the sofa to await his turn.

"At your pleasure, sir," said a pale young man with a slight black mustache, looking across at him as he turned a seat round.

Pablito went forward in an absent sort of way, and dropped into the armchair with the languid grace adopted by those endowed by Providence with great superiority.

The lad covered his face with soap, and the Belinchon youth, with his proud head thrown back, waited with majestic calm for the dark hue covering his cheeks to be removed. He kept his eyes closed so as better to enjoy the vague poetic thoughts passing through his mind, for his head was always full of ideas on leaving the stable. His legs were stretched out comfortably under the table, and his gloved hands hung lazily from the arms of the chair.

"Fernando," said the barber, who was about to shave him, to one of his companions.

"What do you want, Cosme?"

This name made Pablito tremble without knowing why; he opened his eyes, and gave a long look at the hairdresser. He did not know him, he was a new hand in the establishment; but this, instead of calming him, made him change his position several times, with a loss of his habitual ease and languor.

"Can you give me the razor that was sharpened to-day?"

"Here it is."

Fernando stretched out his hand and gave the razor to Cosme. A vague desire to rise from his seat now came into Pablito's mind, but before he could do so the barber had taken him by the nose and was proceeding to shave him.

At the end of some minutes, during which our friend, from under his long eyelashes, followed with some alarm the movements of the barber's hand, Cosme said to him, in a low voice, while his lips wreathed with a forced smile which much enlarged his mouth:

"You are SeÑorito Belinchon, eh?"

"Yes," was the reply.

"I have known you for some time," continued the barber, still with the same voice and smile. "Oh, yes, for a long time. You don't know me, that's evident. Gentlemen don't take much notice of us. I often see you about here on horseback, and sometimes on foot, and I frequently notice you at the balls at the school. You dance very well, sir, very well."

"Tush!" returned Pablito, whose desire to rise was now quite overwhelming.

"Yes, very well; and, moreover, you know how to choose a partner. Caramba, sir, what pretty girls you always take, sir! Some months ago you were always dancing with a red-haired girl. She is the sister of a friend of mine. But now you are always dancing with one prettier still—Valentina. Caramba, what a good eye you have, sir! I have known this Valentina since I was a boy—we were friends at one time. Haven't you heard her talk of me—of Cosme?"

"No," murmured the youth, who was breaking out into a cold sweat.

"Well, that's strange, as we were great friends—so great that three months ago we were going to be married. But then you came along, sir, and all was over."

Cosme uttered these last words in a tremulous voice. Pablito had now great cold drops of sweat upon his brow.

Like his illustrious father, Pablo had a horror of treachery and deceit.

"Of course, what could one expect?" continued the barber, with the uncertain tone of voice divided between the desire to laugh or to weep, and at the same time he dexterously passed the razor across the throat of the gay Lothario to do away with a few encroaching hairs. "Of course a young gentleman of the upper class like you can soon oust a rough fellow like me. Girls lose their heads directly one of your sort whispers sweet nothings in their ears. They do it to amuse themselves, when it is for nothing worse. It is too well known that you have no intention of marrying Valentina. You like to spend your evenings with her on the balcony, eh? And then you'll forget her. But I truly loved the girl."

The barber's voice trembled again, and his hand also shook; but Pablito was motionless, he was petrified.

"But now," continued Cosme, "who would marry her but a madman? We poor are beneath you, and we have to bear these things. If you had been my equal we would have met on fair ground. But if I attacked you I should soon have my head broken and be put into prison. And yet," he continued after a moment's silence, in a hoarser tone, "if I now went suddenly mad, sir, farewell to horses and carriages, farewell to balls, farewell to Valentina; just by a slight stroke with this razor—pif!—and all would be over forever—"

Pablito, whose face was now as white without the soap as it had been with it, then uttered such a cry of horror and misery that Piscis, whose eyes had been suspiciously fixed upon the barber, now jumped up suddenly and caught him by the arms; Pablo sprang from his seat, and the master and all his employees cried out simultaneously:

"What is it?"

"Seize the murderer!" exclaimed Pablito, springing upon Cosme, who was as pale as death under his arrest. In one instant the gay young man, still cold with fear, told them what had happened, and poor Cosme was kicked out of the shop by the master, who did not wish to lose the best customer in the town.