“Ah, Pepe—­cousin!  I believe that you are right,” exclaimed Rosario, drowned in tears.  “Your words resound within my heart, arousing in it new energy, new life.  Here in this darkness, where we cannot see each other’s faces, an ineffable light emanates from you and inundates my soul.  What power have you to transform me in this way?  The moment I saw you I became another being.  In the days when I did not see you I returned to my former insignificance, my natural cowardice.  Without you, my Pepe, I live in Limbo.  I will do as you tell me, 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 seemed to Pepe Rey not that his head had struck against the sacred foot, but that this had moved, warning him in the briefest and most eloquent manner.  Raising his head he said, half seriously, half gayly: