for Chonita differ? How
can you be sure that this is love? What is your idea of love?"

He sat down and was silent for a moment, then spoke thoughtfully:
"Love is not passion, for one may feel that for many women; not
affection, for friendship demands that. Not even sympathy and
comradeship; one can find either with men. Nor all, for I have felt
all, yet something was lacking. Love is the mysterious turning of one
heart to another with the promise of a magnetic harmony, a strange
original delight, a deep satisfaction, a surety of permanence, which
did either heart roam the world it never would find again. It is the
knowledge that did the living body turn to corruption, the spirit
within would still hold and sway the steel which had rushed unerringly
to its magnet. It is the knowledge that weakness will only arouse
tenderness, never disgust, as when the fancy reigns and the heart
sleeps; that faults will clothe themselves in the individuality of the
owner and become treasures to the loving mind that sees, but worships.
It is the development of the highest form of selfishness, the
passionate and abiding desire to sacrifice one's self to the happiness
of one beloved. Above all, it is the impossibility to cease to love,
no matter what reason, or prudence, or jealousy, or disapproval, or
terrible discoveries, may dictate. Let the mind sit on high and argue
the soul's mate out of doors, it will rebound, when all is said and
done, like a rubber ball when the pressure of the finger is removed.
As for Chonita she is the lost part of me."

He left that day, and without seeing Chonita again. Valencia was in
wildest delirium for a week; at the end of the second every hair on
her head, her brows, and her eyelashes had fallen. She looked like a
white mummy, a ghastly pitiful caricature of the beautiful woman whose
arrows quivered in so many hearts. They rolled her in a blanket and
took her home; and then I sought Chonita, who had barely left her
room and never gone to Valencia's. I told her that I had witnessed the
curse, and described the result.

"Have you no remorse?" I asked.

"None."

"You have ruined the beauty, the happiness, the fortune, of another
woman."

"I have done what I intended."

"Do you realize that again you have raised a barrier between yourself
and your religion? You do not look very repentant."

"Revenge is sweeter than religion."

Then in a burst of anger I confessed that I had told Estenega. For a