Two hours after sundown on that night of sorrow, Doña Dalmacia Navarro sat alone in her sala, alone and in darkness, save for a lamp which burned dimly in the ante-sala on the writing-table of her husband. So had she sat alone ever since the firing had ceased on the Plaza Miserere, communing anxiously with herself, refusing all attention or sympathy from those who would gladly have shared her anxiety with her, replying only to those who would at times approach her with this one question: "Yet has no one come?" And the answer was always, no. Men hurried across the wide, open space before her sala windows and along the adjacent street; eagerly listening, she heard something of the words they spoke as they passed on--these words were ever of disaster, ruin and despair, and as she listened her heart sank within her. The army was evidently completely beaten; and Isidro and the gallant men he led, she knew them well, they were not the men to fly like frightened boys, they would have withstood the onset of the English even if left alone; and those volleys she had heard, and that roaring of the guns, at whom had they been directed? who had fired them? She shuddered to herself as she thought how she had exulted at the sound, and had pictured to herself hundreds of prostrate foes, stretched in wounds and death on her native soil. Unable to bear her anxious thoughts in the quiet darkness of her sala, she rose from her seat and went into the ante-sala, drawing her heavy mantle round her with a shiver. She went and sat in her husband's chair, and leaned upon his desk, turning over his papers mechanically, scarce knowing what she did. She took up his pen and fondled it in her hands; beside it lay a tinsel penwiper, heavily embroidered with beads and gold cord, which she had made for him herself; she bent over it and kissed it, as she had seen him do the day she had given it to him, his saint's day, not two short months ago. Then she looked under the sofa and saw his slippers lying there, and drew them out and laid them beside his chair ready for him when he should come in. Would he ever put them on again? As she asked herself that question a low moan broke from her, she could look at them no longer, she could no longer bear the sight and neighbourhood of all these things which spoke to her of him, and seemed to ask her were they his no more? She left the ante-sala and the dim light, and went back to the darkness of her sala, crouching down on a low chair and burying her face in her hands.