In my heart I registered a vow: that, ere long, I should be back in the Calle del Obispo. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I was not slow in the fulfilment of that vow. The very next day, after being released from morning parade, I repaired to the place in which the fair apparition had made itself manifest. I had no difficulty in recognising the house. It was one of the largest in the street, easily distinguished by its frescoed front, windows with "balcons," and jalousies inside. A grand gate entrance piercing the centre told that carriages were kept. In short, everything betokened the residence of a "rico." I remembered the very window--so carefully had I made my mental memoranda. It looked different now. There was but the frame; the picture was no longer in it. I glanced to the other windows of the dwelling. They were all alike empty. The blinds were drawn down. No one inside appeared to take any interest in what was passing in the street. I had my walk for nothing. A score of turns, up and down; three cigars smoked while making them; some sober reflections that admonished me I was doing a very ridiculous thing; and I strolled back to my quarters with a humiliating sense of having made a fool of myself, and a resolve not to repeat the performance. CHAPTER FOUR. A PAIR OF COUNTERPARTS. 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.