“Do you still love me?”
“Child!”
“Then ... protect my father, and break off the marriage!”
Then she related her last interview with Ibarra, omitting the reference to her birth.
Father Dámaso could scarcely believe what he heard.
“While he lived,” continued the maiden, “I intended to fight, to wait, to trust. I wanted to live to hear him spoken of ... but now that they have killed him, now there is no reason for my living and suffering.”
She said this slowly, in a low voice, calmly and without a tear.
“But, you goose; isn’t Linares a thousand times better than....?”
“When he was living, I could have married ... I was thinking of fleeing afterward ... my father wanted nothing more than the relative. Now that he is dead, no other man will call me his wife.... While he lived, I could have debased myself and still had the consolation of knowing that he existed and perhaps was thinking of me. Now that he is dead ... the convent or the tomb.”
Her voice had a firmness in its accent which took away Father Dámaso’s joy and set him to thinking.