o at once; and all three, Luscinda, Cardenio, and Dorothea, stood
in silent amazement scarcely knowing what had happened to them.

They gazed at one another without speaking, Dorothea at Don Fernando, Don
Fernando at Cardenio, Cardenio at Luscinda, and Luscinda at Cardenio. The
first to break silence was Luscinda, who thus addressed Don Fernando:
"Leave me, Senor Don Fernando, for the sake of what you owe to yourself;
if no other reason will induce you, leave me to cling to the wall of
which I am the ivy, to the support from which neither your importunities,
nor your threats, nor your promises, nor your gifts have been able to
detach me. See how Heaven, by ways strange and hidden from our sight, has
brought me face to face with my true husband; and well you know by
dear-bought experience that death alone will be able to efface him from
my memory. May this plain declaration, then, lead you, as you can do
nothing else, to turn your love into rage, your affection into
resentment, and so to take my life; for if I yield it up in the presence
of my beloved husband I count it well bestowed; it may be by my death he
will be convinced that I kept my faith to him to the last moment of
life."

Meanwhile Dorothea had come to herself, and had heard Luscinda's words,
by means of which she divined who she was; but seeing that Don Fernando
did not yet release her or reply to her, summoning up her resolution as
well as she could she rose and knelt at his feet, and with a flood of
bright and touching tears addressed him thus:

"If, my lord, the beams of that sun that thou holdest eclipsed in thine
arms did not dazzle and rob thine eyes of sight thou wouldst have seen by
this time that she who kneels at thy feet is, so long as thou wilt have
it so, the unhappy and unfortunate Dorothea. I am that lowly peasant girl
whom thou in thy goodness or for thy pleasure wouldst raise high enough
to call herself thine; I am she who in the seclusion of innocence led a
contented life until at the voice of thy importunity, and thy true and
tender passion, as it seemed, she opened the gates of her modesty and
surrendered to thee the keys of her liberty; a gift received by thee but
thanklessly, as is clearly shown by my forced retreat to the place where
thou dost find me, and by thy appearance under the circumstances in which
I see thee. Nevertheless, I would not have thee suppose that I have come
here driven by my shame; it is only grief and sorrow at s