h
his white beard and zealous eyes, was bending over my couch, while a
chair, on high runners, rocked empty behind him. I stared.

"Senor, the night is far advanced," he said soothingly, "and Dolores, my
wife, watches over Dona Seraphina's slumbers, on the other side of this
wall."

I had been dead to the world for nearly twenty hours, and the awakening
resembled a new birth, for I felt as weak and helpless as an infant.

It is extraordinary how quickly we regained so much of our strength; but
I suppose people recover sooner from the effects of privation than from
the weakness of disease. Keeping pace with the return of our bodily
vigour, the anxieties of mind returned, augmented tenfold by all the
weight of our sinister experience. And yet, what worse could happen to
us in the future? What other terror could it hold? We had come back from
the very confines of destruction. But Seraphina, reclining back in an
armchair, very still, with her eyes fixed on the high white wall facing
the veranda across the court, would murmur the word "Separation!"

The possibility of our lives being forced apart was terrible to her
affection, and intolerable to her pride. She had made her choice, and
the feeling she had surrendered herself to so openly must have had
a supreme potency. She had disregarded for it all the traditions of
silence and reserve. She had looked at me fondly through the very tears
of her grief; she had followed me--leaving her dead unburied and her
prayers unsaid. What more could she have done to proclaim her love
to the world? Could she, after that, allow anything short of death to
thwart her fidelity? Never! And if she were to discover that I could,
after all, find it in my heart to support an existence in which she had
no share, then, indeed, it would be more than enough to make her die of
shame.

"Ah, dearest!" I said, "you shall never die of shame."

We were different, but we had read each other's natures by a fierce
light. I understood the point of honour in her constancy, and she never
doubted the scruples of my true devotion, which had brought so many
dangers on her head. We were flying not to save our lives, but to
preserve inviolate our truth to each other and to ourselves. And if our
sentiments appear exaggerated, violent, and overstrained, I must point
back to their origin. Our love had not grown like a delicate flower,
cherished in tempered sunshine. It had never known the atmosphere of
tenderness;