er voice
I started. It was for this I had been waiting; this was the last test of
my love. And lo, her enunciation was precise and clear, not lisping and
incomplete like that of her family; and the voice, though deeper than
usual with women, was still both youthful and womanly. She spoke in a
rich chord; golden contralto strains mingled with hoarseness, as the red
threads were mingled with the brown among her tresses. It was not only a
voice that spoke to my heart directly; but it spoke to me of her. And
yet her words immediately plunged me back upon despair.

'You will go away,' she said, 'to-day.'

Her example broke the bonds of my speech; I felt as lightened of a
weight, or as if 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 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.
Go? Not I, Olalla--