ne
moment only, and say the words once more.

Then she sat down and told herself how foolish she was. She had been
separated from him for many long and empty months, and now she had been
with him and talked long with him twice in leas than three hours, and
yet she could not bear that he should be out of her sight five minutes
without wishing to risk everything to see him again. She tried to laugh
at herself, repeating over and over again that she was very, very
foolish, and that she should have a just contempt for any woman who
could be as foolish as she. For some moments she sat still, staring at
the wall.

In the thought of him that filled her heart and soul and mind, she saw
that her own life had begun when he had first spoken to her, and she
felt that it would end with the last good-by, because if he should die
or cease to love her, there would be nothing more to live for. Her early
girlhood seemed dim and far away, dull and lifeless, as if it had not
been hers at all, and had no connection with the present. She saw
herself in the past, as she could not see herself now, and the child she
remembered seemed not herself but another--a fair-haired girl living in
the gloomy old house in Valladolid, with her blind sister and an old
maiden cousin of her father's, who had offered to bring up the two and
to teach them, being a woman of some learning, and who fulfilled her
promise in such a conscientious and austere way as made their lives
something of a burden under her strict rule. But that was all forgotten
now, and though she still lived in Valladolid she had probably changed
but little in the few years since Dolores had seen her; she was part of
the past, a relic of something that had hardly ever had a real
existence, and which it was not at all necessary to remember. There was
one great light in the girl's simple existence, it had come all at once,
and it was with her still. There was nothing dim nor dark nor forgotten
about the day when she had been presented at court by the Duchess
Alvarez, and she had first seen Don John, and he had first seen her and
had spoken to her, when he had talked with the Duchess herself. At the
first glance--and it was her first sight of the great world--she had
seen that of all the men in the great hall, there was no one at all like
him. She had no sooner looked into his face and cast her eyes upon his
slender figure, all in white then, as he was dressed to-night, than she
began to compa