ang in my heart, was like a key to nature's
secrets; and the very stones that rattled under my feet appeared alive
and friendly. Olalla! Her touch had quickened, and renewed, and strung
me up to the old pitch of concert with the rugged earth, to a swelling
of the soul that men learn to forget in their polite assemblies. Love
burned in me like rage; tenderness waxed fierce; I hated, I adored, I
pitied, I revered her with ecstasy. She seemed the link that bound me in
with dead things on the one hand, and with our pure and pitying God upon
the other: a thing brutal and divine, and akin at once to the innocence
and to the unbridled forces of the earth.

My head thus reeling, I came into the courtyard of the residencia, and
the sight of the mother struck me like a revelation. She sat there, all
sloth and contentment, blinking under the strong sunshine, branded with
a passive enjoyment, a creature set quite apart, before whom my ardour
fell away like a thing ashamed. I stopped a moment, and, commanding such
shaken tones as I was able, said a word or two. She looked at me with
her unfathomable kindness; her voice in reply sounded vaguely out of the
realm of peace in which she slumbered, and there fell on my mind, for
the first time, a sense of respect for one so uniformly innocent and
happy, and I passed on in a kind of wonder at myself that I should be so
much disquieted.

On my table there lay a piece of the same yellow paper I had seen in the
north room; it was written on with pencil in the same hand, Olalla's
hand, and I picked it up with a sudden sinking of alarm, and read, "If
you have any kindness for Olalla, if you have any chivalry for a
creature sorely wrought, go from here to-day; in pity, in honour, for
the sake of Him who died, I supplicate that you shall go." I looked at
this a while in mere stupidity, then I began to awaken to a weariness
and horror of life; the sunshine darkened outside on the bare hills, and
I began to shake like a man in terror. The vacancy thus suddenly opened
in my life unmanned me like a physical void. It was not my heart, it was
not my happiness, it was life itself that was involved. I could not
lose her. I said so, and stood repeating it. And then, like one in a
dream, I moved to the window, put forth my hand to open the casement,
and thrust it through the pane. The blood spurted from my wrist; and
with an instantaneous quietude and command of myself, I pressed my thumb
on the little le