have come as the embassador of your father, and I do not
want to distress so excellent a friend, it is but right that I should
tell you, that you may repeat it to him, that I am much better now. But
it is strange that you have come alone. Don Pedro must be very much
occupied indeed, not to accompany you."

"My father did not accompany me, madam, because he does not know that I
have come to see you. I have chosen to come without him because my
farewell must be a serious, a solemn, perhaps a final one, and his will
naturally be of a very different character. My father will return to
the village in a few weeks; it is possible that I may never return to
it, and, if I do, it will be in a very different character from my
present one."

Pepita could not restrain herself. The happy future of which she had
dreamed vanished, at the words of Don Luis, into air. Her unalterable
resolution to vanquish, at whatever cost, this man, the only one she had
loved in her life, the only one she felt herself capable of loving,
seemed to have been made in vain. She felt herself condemned at twenty
years of age, with all her beauty, to perpetual widowhood, to solitude,
to an unrequited love--for any other love was impossible for her. The
character of Pepita, in whom obstacles only strengthened and kindled
afresh her desires, with whom a determination, once taken, carried
everything before it until it was fulfilled, showed itself now in all
its violence and without restraint. She must conquer, or die in the
attempt. Social considerations, the fixed habit of guarding and
concealing the feelings, acquired in the great world, which serve as a
restraint to the paroxysms of passion, and which veil in ambiguous
phrases, and dilute in circumlocutions, the most violent explosion of
undisciplined emotion, had no power with Pepita. She had had but little
intercourse with the world, she knew no middle way; her only rule of
conduct hitherto had been to obey blindly her mother and her husband
while they lived, and afterward to command despotically every other
human being. Thus it was that Pepita spoke her own thoughts on this
occasion, and showed herself such as she really was. Her soul, with all
the passion it contained, took sensible form in her words; and her
words, instead of serving to conceal her thoughts and her feelings, gave
them substance. She did not speak as a lady of our _salons_ would have
spoken, with circumlocutions and attenuations of expre