ardour of my love, telling her that I lived upon the thought of her,

slept only to dream of her loveliness, and would gladly forswear my

country, my language, and my friends, to live for ever by her side. And

then, strongly commanding myself, I changed the note; I reassured, I

comforted her; I told her I had divined in her a pious and heroic spirit,

with which I was worthy to sympathise, and which I longed to share and

lighten. 'Nature,' I told her, 'was the voice of God, which men disobey

at peril; and if we were thus humbly drawn together, ay, even as by a

miracle of love, it must imply a divine fitness in our souls; we must be

made,' I said--'made for one another. We should be mad rebels,' I cried

out--'mad rebels against God, not to obey this instinct.'

She shook her head. 'You will go to-day,' she repeated, and then with a

gesture, and in a sudden, sharp note--'no, not to-day,' she cried, 'to-

morrow!'

But at this sign of relenting, power came in upon me in a tide. I

stretched out my arms and called upon her name; and she leaped to me and

clung to me. The hills rocked about us, the earth quailed; a shock as of

a blow went through me and left me blind and dizzy. And the next moment

she had thrust me back, broken rudely from my arms, and fled with the

speed of a deer among the cork-trees.

I stood and shouted to the mountains; I turned and went back towards the

residencia, waltzing upon air. She sent me away, and yet I had but to

call upon her name and she came to me. These were but the weaknesses of

girls, from which even she, the strangest of her sex, was not exempted.

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