"Thanks, child; but I am not worthy of such sublime devotion. Think of the painful existence you create for yourself—think of the pleasant calm and peaceful life you leave behind you, to affiance yourself to grief, perchance to death."
"What do I care for that? Death will be welcome if it come by your side. I love you!"
Don Louis hesitated.
"Think," he said presently, "of the immense grief of your father, whom you abandon—your father who loves you so dearly, and has only you——"
She laid her hand quickly on his lips.
"Be silent—be silent!" she screamed in a heart-rending accent. "Do not speak of my father. Why do you say that to me? Why augment my despair? I love you, Don Louis—I love you! Henceforth you are everything to me—fortune, parents, friends—all, I tell you. From the day when I first saw you, powerful and terrible as the exterminating angel, my heart fled toward yours. Something, a presentiment perhaps, revealed to me that our two destinies were for ever enchained to each other. When I saw you again my heart had divined you, but I remained in the shadow, for you did not need me; but now times are changed. You are betrayed, tracked, abandoned, by those whose interest it would have been to support you. The country you have come to deliver renounces you. My father, whose life you saved, has become your most implacable foe, because you spurned his offers, and would not serve his paltry and shameful ambition. Well, I, intrenching myself in my heart as in a fortress, have in my turn renounced my country, abandoned my father, and, like a true daughter of the Mexican volcanoes, feeling lava instead of blood coursing in my veins, bounding with indignation at the numberless acts of treachery which have begirt you on all sides—I have forgotten everything, even that modesty innate in maidens, and defying that world which I abhor and despise, because it rejects you, I have come to you to love you—to render sweeter the few days which are perhaps still left you to live; for I do not deceive myself as to the future any more than you do, Don Louis. And when the fatal hour arrives, when the hurricane bursts above your head, I shall be there to support you by my presence, to encourage you by my boundless love, and to die in your arms!"
There is in the woman who really loves, and whom passion masters, so grand a magnetic attraction, a poesy so powerful, that the man with the greatest self-restraint feels, in spite of himself, a species of voluptuous dizziness, and suddenly finds his reason desert him, only to see that love he inspires, and of which he is proud.
"But you wept, Angela," the count said. "Your tears are still flowing."
"Yes," she continued energetically, "I wept—I still weep. Well, cannot you guess why, Don Louis? It is because I am a woman, after all; because I am weak, and, in spite of all my will and all my love, my rebellious nature is struggling with my heart; and because, in order to follow you, and give myself up to you, I despise all that a woman ought to remember under such circumstances, confined as she is by the miserable claims of a puny civilisation, a slave to stupid proprieties, and compelled constantly to hide her feelings in order to play an infamous comedy. That is why I wept—why I still weep. But what matter these tears, my well-beloved? There is as much joy as shame in them, and they prove to you the triumph you have gained over me."
"Angela," the count answered nobly, "I will deceive neither your love nor your confidence. Your happiness will not depend on me."