f the garden in friendly companionship
and having eyes and ears only for each other.

"Pepe," Rosario was saying, "all that you have been telling me is pure
fancy, one of those stories that you clever men know so well how to put
together. You think that because I am a country girl I believe every
thing I am told."

"If you understood me as well as I think I understand you, you would
know that I never say any thing I do not mean. But let us have done
with foolish subtleties and lovers' sophistries, that lead only to
misunderstandings. I will speak to you only in the language of truth.
Are you by chance a young lady whose acquaintance I have made on the
promenade or at a party, and with whom I propose to spend a pleasant
hour or two? No, you are my cousin. You are something more. Rosario,
let us at once put things on their proper footing. Let us drop
circumlocutions. I have come here to marry you."

Rosario felt her face burning, and her heart was beating violently.

"See, my dear cousin," continued the young man. "I swear to you that
if you had not pleased me I should be already far away from this place.
Although politeness and delicacy would have obliged me to make an effort
to conceal my disappointment, I should have found it hard to do so. That
is my character."

"Cousin, you have only just arrived," said Rosarito laconically, trying
to laugh.

"I have only just arrived, and I already know all that I wanted to know;
I know that I love you; that you are the woman whom my heart has long
been announcing to me, saying to me night and day, 'Now she is coming,
now she is near; now you are burning.'"

These words served Rosario as an excuse for breaking into the laugh
that had been dimpling her lips. Her soul swelled with happiness; she
breathed an atmosphere of joy.

"You persist in depreciating yourself," continued Pepe, "but for me you
possess every perfection. You have the admirable quality of radiating
on all around you the divine light of your soul. The moment one sees you
one feels instinctively the nobility of your mind and the purity of
your heart. To see you is to see a celestial being who, through the
forgetfulness of Heaven, remains upon the earth; you are an angel, and I
adore you."

When he had said this it seemed as if he had fulfilled an important
mission. Rosarito, overcome by the violence of her emotion, felt her
scant strength suddenly fail her; and, half-fainting, she sank on a
stone that in t