"Why did you bring about Santacilla's death?" he demanded. She gazed at him dully, uncomprehendingly. "It was because he was jealous," he proceeded; "you must hold to that." She nodded, dazed. "When they come into the room and find him you must show what he did to you. And, after all, you didn't kill him. Perhaps that will save you," his voice was without conviction. "They won't believe you, and they may try measures to get at the truth; but you will be faithful. You will keep your secret, and--and I must go. I shall ask for you downstairs, make them send up a servant, and shout as loudly as any."
She held up her battered countenance dumbly and, with a feeling of transcendent reverence, he kissed her cut lips. Thrown across the end of the bed, the shawl she had danced in, blazing with gay color, cast the reflection of its carmines and yellows on the calcimined wall. It was like a burst of the music which accompanied her dancing. The castanets lay on the floor. The blessed saint of Cuban independence! Then the caution that had become a part of his necessity rode uppermost: he proceeded silently to the door, and, closing it behind him, went, meeting no one, to the ground floor, where he pulled irritably at the wire hanging from a bell under the ceiling. The raw jangle brought a servant, a rosy-cheeked Gallego boy, heavy with sleep, who went stumbling up the stairs on Charles' errand.
In his own room a wave of physical horror swept over Charles Abbott; he was obliged to sit down, and the chair, the floor, seemed to rock at the giddy sickness of the memory of Santacilla, stumbling with a wine-colored face toward the window in a vain gasping for air, for life. He recovered slowly: notwithstanding the death of Tirso Labrador, the wasted shape of Andrés' brother, all the tragedies he had heard reported, it was not until now that he realized the entire grimness of the undertaking against Spain. The last possibility of the spectacular departed, leaving him with a new sense of the imminence of death. He had considered this, under certain circumstances welcoming it, or dismissing it with a creditable calmness, many times before; but then his attitude had been softened by the detachment, the impersonality, of his view. But at last the feeling of death was tangibly at his own throat; not today, nor tomorrow, probably; but inescapably. Well, he assured himself, he wouldn't, at that intense moment, fail an inner necessity; but his understanding gave him an additional feeling of the accidental aspects of life and of the Cuban revolution.