"How are you, Maximina?"
She could scarcely articulate her answer. Her hand trembled violently.
"What does this mean? You are trembling," said the caballero, retaining it a moment in his.
She made no reply.
"If it were an enemy who came in, I should understand this agitation; but as I am such a devoted friend ... so stupidly devoted as I am to you.... I am wrong to call myself a friend: I should do better to call myself your slave, for these many days you have exercised an absolute dominion over me."
The young wife's features were contracted by a smile which seemed rather like a face of terror. Her eyes expressed the same dismay. She tried to say something, but her voice died in her throat.
"The last time that I spoke with you, Maximina," the Andalusian went on to say, after he had taken a seat at her side, "I was bold enough to give you a hint of what was passing within my heart. Perhaps I was foolish; but the step has been taken, and I cannot retrace it. I must complete to-day what then I did not do more than indicate; I must express to you,—although it is very difficult—the love, the idolatry that you inspire in me, the terrible anxieties which I have been suffering for more than a month, the state of genuine madness to which your cruelty has brought me...."
Maximina continued speechless. She looked like a statue of Desolation.
"I am going to tell you all, all! You will pardon me, will you not, lovely Maximina?"
And the audacious caballero pronounced these words with his insinuating, mellow voice, at the same time gently laying the palm of his hand on the back of Maximina's. She withdrew it as though she had touched a vile animal; and leaping to her feet, as though pushed by a spring, she ran to the door, and hastened into the parlor.