omething supernatural in this; for I loved you from the moment I first
saw you--almost before I saw you. Long before I was conscious of loving
you, I loved you. It would seem as if there were some fatality in
this--that it was decreed, that it was a predestination."

"And if it were predestined, if it be decreed," said Pepita, "why not
submit to Fate, why still resist? Sacrifice your purpose to our love.
Have not I sacrificed much? Am I not now sacrificing my pride, my
decorum, my reserve, in supplicating you thus, in making this effort to
overcome your scorn? I too believe that I loved you before I saw you.
Now I love you with my whole heart, and without you there is no
happiness for me. It is true indeed that in my humble intelligence you
can find no rival so powerful as that which I have in yours. Neither
with the understanding, nor the will, nor the affections, can I raise
myself all at once up to God. Neither by nature nor by grace do I mount
or desire to mount up to such exalted spheres. My soul, nevertheless, is
full of religious devotion, and I know and love and adore God; but I
only behold his omnipotence and admire his goodness in the works that
have proceeded from his hands. Nor can I, with the imagination, weave
those visions that you tell me of. Yet I too dreamed of some one nobler,
more intelligent, more poetic, and more enamored, than the men who have
thus far sought my hand; of a lover more distinguished and accomplished
than any of my adorers of this and the neighboring villages, who should
love me, and whom I should love, and to whose will I should blindly
surrender mine. This some one was you. I had a presentiment of it when
they told me that you had arrived at the village. When I saw you for the
first time, I knew it. But, as my imagination is so sterile, the picture
I had formed of you in my mind was not to be compared, even in the most
remote degree, to the reality. I too have read something of romances and
poetry. But from all that my memory retained of them, I was unable to
form a picture that was not far inferior in merit to what I see and
divine in you since I have known you. Thus it is that from the moment I
saw you I was vanquished and undone. If love is, as you say, to die to
self, in order to live in the beloved object, then is my love genuine
and legitimate, for I have died to myself, and live only in you and for
you. I have tried to cast this love away from me, deeming it
ill-requited, and