Later on, when you least expect it, probably, I’ll fly away.  The very first morning when I wake up, feel quite myself again—­and hear inside my head the song of the mischievous bird that has advised me to do so many foolish things in my life—­I’ll pack up my trunk and take flight!  I’ll drop you a line of course; I’ll send you newspaper clippings that speak of me, and you’ll see you have a friend who does not forget you and who sends you greetings from London, Saint Petersburg, or New York—­any one of the corners of this world which many believe so large yet where I am unable to stir without encountering things that bore me.”

“May that moment be long delayed!” said Rafael.  “May it never come!”

“Rash boy!” Leonora exclaimed.  “You don’t know me.  If I were to stay here very long, we’d finish by quarreling and coming to blows.  At bottom I hate men:  I have always been their most terrible enemy.”

Behind their backs they heard the rustle of the gown that Cupido was dragging along behind him with absurd antics.  He was coming to the balcony with dona Pepita to see the sunrise.

Through its dense clouds the sky was beginning to shed a gray, wan light, under which the vast, watery plain took on the whitish color of absinthe.  Down the stream the debris of the inundation was floating, sweepings of wretched poverty, uprooted trees, clumps of reeds, thatched roofs from huts, all dirty, slimy, nauseating.  Bits of flotsam and jetsam became entangled between the orange-trees and formed dams that little by little grew with the new spoils brought along by the current.

In the distance at the very end of the lake, a number of black points could be seen in regular rhythmic motion, stirring their legs like aquatic flies around some roofs barely protruding above the immense field of water.  The rescuers had arrived from Valencia—­with whale-boats of the Fleet, brought overland by rail to the scene of the flood.

The provincial authorities would soon be arriving in Alcira; and the presence of Rafael was indispensable.  Cupido himself, with sudden gravity, advised him to go and meet those boats.

While the barber was putting on his own clothes, Rafael, with intense regret, removed his fur cloak.  It seemed that in taking it off he was losing the warmth of that night of sweet intimacy, the contact of that soft shoulder that had for hours long been leaning against him.

Leonora meanwhile looked at him fixedly.

“We understand each other, don’t we?” she asked, slowly.  “Friends, with no hope of anything more than that.  If you break the pact, you’ll not enter this place again, not even by the second-story window, as you did last night.”

“Yes, friends and nothing more,” Rafael murmured with a tone of sincere sadness, that seemed to move Leonora.

Her green eyes lighted up:  her pupils seemed to glitter with spangles of gold.  She stepped nearer and held out her hand.