and fiery passion,
but never in its whole history has it bred such a tremulously beautiful
love story as that of Donna Isabella Angelica y Bananas. A romance of
two passionate hearts in such a vivid setting cannot but fail to make
the eye kindle and the pulses throb. Compared to it, Lancelot and Elaine
become cardboard puppets, Dante and Beatrice figures of clay utterly
devoid of life, while Paolo and Francesca appear merely idiotic.

Picture to yourself, if you will, the Spain of the Middle Ages; if you
can't, it doesn't matter. Isabella Angelica was born at Seville in 1582,
the daughter of Don Juan de Cabarajal and Maria his wife. Don Juan owned
the Castello del Hurtado, having been left it by his infamous but regal
uncle, Don Lopez a Basastos.

The Castello lay surrounded in the foreground by turrets and moats, in
the middle distance by orange groves and extraordinarily verdant
meadows; while in the background the majestic Pyrenees, rearing their
snowy peaks in serried ranks of symmetrical splendour, imparted to the
whole thing the semblance of rugged grandeur which is the birthright of
every true Spaniard. Isabella Angelica's childhood dawned and waned in
these exquisite surroundings: she would play with her tutors various
games, some of them traditional, such as "catch orange" and
"_raralara_,"[19] and now and then frolics of her own invention, for
history tells us she was ever a merry little trickster. It was not until
she was seventeen that the true radiance of her beauty became apparent.
Her mother had been wiser to guard the child more closely than she did,
for do we not read in Dr. Polata's "From Girl to Woman" that between the
ages of nineteen and twenty she was constantly seen mounting the
Pyrenees in a daring fashion and entirely unattended? But still,
doubtless owing to her charming nature, which was a sweet composition
of mischief and kindliness, she remained unspoilt by this undesirable
contact with a rude world which should, until her marriage, have been
outside her girlish ken.

When she reached the age of twenty--"the very threshold of womanhood,"
as Fernando Lope so beautifully puts it--she was betrothed to Pedro y
Bananas, a noble fresh from the vice and debauchery of the Court at
Valladolid. Knowing naught of love or passion, she consented without
hesitation, being but a tool in the hands of her parents, and a few
months later the wedding took place with enormous pomp in the Cathedral
at Sevill