e, I will arise and
follow you. We will go together wherever you wish. Do you know that I
feel well? Do you know that I have no fever: that I have recovered my
strength; that I want to run about and cry out; that my whole being is
renewed and enlarged, and multiplied a hundred-fold in order to adore
you? Pepe, you are right. I am not sick, I am only afraid; or rather,
bewitched."

"That is it, bewitched."

"Bewitched! Terrible eyes look at me, and I remain mute and trembling.
I am afraid, but of what? You alone have the strange power of calling me
back to life. Hearing you, I live again. I believe if I were to die and
you were to pass by my grave, that deep under the ground I should feel
your footsteps. Oh, if I could see you now! But you are here beside me,
and I cannot doubt that it is you. So many days without seeing you! I
was mad. Each day of solitude appeared to me a century. They said to
me, to-morrow and to-morrow, and always to-morrow. I looked out of
the window at night, and the light of the lamp in your room served
to console me. At times your shadow on the window was for me a divine
apparition. I stretched out my arms to you, I shed tears and cried out
inwardly, without daring to do so with my voice. When I received the
message you sent me with the maid, when I received your letter telling
me that you were going away, I grew very sad, I thought my soul was
leaving my body and that I was dying slowly. I fell, like the bird
wounded as it flies, that falls and, falling, dies. To-night, when I
saw that you were awake so late, I could not resist the longing I had to
speak to you; and I came down stairs. I believe that all the courage of
my life has been used up in this single act, and that now I can never
be any thing again but a coward. But you will give me courage; you will
give me strength; you will help me, will you not? Pepe, my dear cousin,
tell me that you will; tell me that I am strong, and I will be strong;
tell me that I am not ill, and I will not be ill. I am not ill now. I
feel so well that I could laugh at my ridiculous maladies."

As she said this she felt herself clasped rapturously in her cousin's
arms. An "Oh!" was heard, but it came, not from her lips, but from his,
for in bending his head, he had struck it violently against the feet of
the crucifix. In the darkness it is that the stars are seen.

In the exalted state of his mind, by a species of hallucination natural
in the darkness, it see