ot breathe
a single complaint, if you should abandon me forever, and never think of
me again."

To answer this fittingly, our poor and beggarly human speech was
insufficient for Don Luis. He cut short Pepita's words by pressing his
lips to hers, and again clasping her to his heart.

* * * * *

Some time afterward, with much previous coughing and shuffling of the
feet, Antonona entered the library with the words:

"What a long talk you must have had! The sermon our student has been
preaching this time can not have been that of the _seven words_--it came
very near being that of the _forty hours_. It is time you should go now,
Don Luis; it is almost two o'clock in the morning."

"Very well," answered Pepita, "he will go directly."

Antonona left the library again, and waited outside.

Pepita was like one transformed. One might suppose that the joys she had
missed in her childhood, the happiness and contentment she had failed to
taste in her early youth, the gay activity and sprightliness that a
harsh mother and an old husband had repressed, and, as it were, crushed
within her, had suddenly burst into life in her soul, like the green
leaves of the trees, whose germination has been retarded by the snows
and frosts of a long and severe winter.

A city-bred lady, familiar with what we call social conventionalities,
may find something strange, and even worthy of censure, in what I am
about to relate of Pepita. But Pepita, although refined by instinct, was
a being in whom every feeling was spontaneous, and in whose nature there
was no room for the affected sedateness and circumspection that are
customary in the great world. Thus it was that, seeing the obstacles
removed that had stood in the way of her happiness, and Don Luis
conquered, holding his voluntary promise that he would make her his
wife, and believing herself, with justice, to be loved, nay, worshiped
by him whom she too loved and worshiped, she danced and laughed, and
gave way to other manifestations of joy that had in them, after all,
something childlike and innocent.

But it was necessary that Don Luis should now depart. Pepita took a comb
and smoothed his hair lovingly, and kissed him. She then rearranged his
neck-tie.

"Farewell, lord of my life," she said, "dear sovereign of my soul. I
will tell your father everything if you fear to do. He is good, and he
will forgive us."

At last the lovers separated.

When Pepita