Juan would have come if this had availed. Juan would have come.
It was a dream, she said; the great sacrifice had not been attempted, she was asleep in her bed, driven by the horrible distractions of a senseless dream. She struggled to defeat it, beating with resentful weakness to break its insane illusion, fighting to rise as one drowning fights to cleave the waters and plunge into the sun, if only to see the world again and confirm his unhappy fate. She fought the smothering specter with all her strength, yet without a twitch of a poor cold finger, a convulsion of a tear-wet lid.
She lay as nerveless as one dead, and sank, and sank, under the pressure of what she resented with her last gleam of thought as a dream.
Juan Molinero did not understand, when he came to her there prostrate in the dim lights of the altar, what this sacrifice for him had been. He saw the pitiful trail of blood across the tiles from the door, the dark stain on her bare feet. He was weak in the shaking of a terrible fear as he fell to his knees beside her, and touched her cheek in the agony of his life's greatest dread.
"Tula! Tula!" he pleaded, bending over her, his voice in her ear.
So it was she broke the trammeling meshes of the dream that was not a dream.
She felt him lift her, and was serene as if an angel had stooped out of heaven to bear her to paradise. Juan stood holding her in his arms, the light
