"I—why should I go?" repeated Nela with disconsolate bitterness. "You have time enough—for me, it is too late."
And Nela's head sunk on her breast and she sat for some time insensible to the persuasive eloquence of the Hippocrates of the future. The idea that she was about to cross the boundary of the spot of earth where she had lived so long, and where her mother slept the sleep of the dead, made her feel as if she were being torn up by the roots. The beauty of the place in all its variety seemed to claim her by a sort of relationship; the rare and fleeting joys, nay, the very misery she had known there; the memory of her friend and of the happy hours when they had walked in the woods or sat by the spring at Saldeoro; all the feelings of admiration or of sympathy, of love or of gratitude, which had grown and blossomed in her soul among these scenes—these flowers—these clouds—these rustling trees—these frowning rocks—inseparable as it were from the loveliness or the grandeur, the progress and the immutability of all these works of nature, were so many roots from her heart, and dragging them up from the soil was bitter anguish.
"No—I am not going," she repeated.
And Celipin argued and talked as if, having by some miracle reached the goal of his career, he belonged to all the academies present and to come.
"You are going home then?" he asked, seeing that his oratory was as unavailing as that of the academies themselves commonly is.
"No."
"You are going to Aldeacorba?"
"No; not there either."
"Then you will go to where Señora Florentina lives."