a spell had been dissolved. I know not in what words I
answered; but, standing before her on the cliffs, I poured out the whole
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 dumbly 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, walking 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.
Go? Not I, Olalla--Oh, not I, Olalla, my Olalla! A bird sang near by;
and in that season birds were rare. It bade me be of good cheer. And
once more the whole countenance of nature, from the ponderous and stable
mountains down to the lightest leaf and the smallest darting fly in the
shadow of the groves, began to stir before me and to put on the
lineaments of life and wear a face of awful joy. The sunshine struck
upon the hills, strong as a hammer on the anvil, and the hills shook;
the earth, under that vigorous insolation, yielded up heady scents; the
woods smouldered in the blaze. I felt the thrill of travail and delight
run through the earth. Something elemental, something rude, violent, and
savage, in the love that s