about what had happened on the previous night, and as he was determined
to ask for an explanation, and knew how proud and haughty she was,
he foresaw an estrangement. In view of this eventuality he had brought
with him the only two letters he had ever received from Paulita, two
scraps of paper, whereon were merely a few hurriedly written lines
with various blots, but in an even handwriting, things that did not
prevent the enamored youth from preserving them with more solicitude
than if they had been the autographs of Sappho and the Muse Polyhymnia.

This decision to sacrifice his love on the altar of dignity, the
consciousness of suffering in the discharge of duty, did not prevent
a profound melancholy from taking possession of Isagani and brought
back into his mind the beautiful days, and nights more beautiful
still, when they had whispered sweet nothings through the flowered
gratings of the entresol, nothings that to the youth took on such a
character of seriousness and importance that they seemed to him the
only matters worthy of meriting the attention of the most exalted human
understanding. He recalled the walks on moonlit nights, the fair, the
dark December mornings after the mass of Nativity, the holy water that
he used to offer her, when she would thank him with a look charged
with a whole epic of love, both of them trembling as their fingers
touched. Heavy sighs, like small rockets, issued from his breast
and brought back to him all the verses, all the sayings of poets and
writers about the inconstancy of woman. Inwardly he cursed the creation
of theaters, the French operetta, and vowed to get revenge on Pelaez at
the first opportunity. Everything about him appeared under the saddest
and somberest colors: the bay, deserted and solitary, seemed more
solitary still on account of the few steamers that were anchored in
it; the sun was dying behind Mariveles without poetry or enchantment,
without the capricious and richly tinted clouds of happier evenings;