The young girl looked down with anxious tenderness upon his face.
“Let me see if you are much changed, Tiburcio,” she continued. “Ah! yes. Grief has left its traces on your brow, but honour has ennobled it. You are as brave as you are handsome, Tiburcio. I learned with pride that danger had never made your cheek turn pale.”
“You heard, did you say?” cried Fabian; “but what have you heard?”
“All, Tiburcio; even to your most secret thoughts. I have heard all, even of your coming here this evening. Do you understand? and I am here!”
“Before I dare to comprehend, Rosarita,—for this time a mistake would kill me,” continued Fabian, whose heart was stirred to its very depths by the young girl’s words, and the tenderness of her manner, “will you answer one question, that is if I dare to ask it?”
“Dare, then, Tiburcio,” said Rosarita, tenderly. “Ask what you wish. I came to-night to hear you—to deny you nothing.”
“Listen,” said the young Count: “six months ago I had to avenge my mother’s death, and that of the man who had stood in my father’s place, Marcos Arellanos; for if you know all, you know that I am no longer—”
“To me you are the same, Tiburcio; I never knew Don Fabian de Mediana.”
“The wretch who was about to expiate his crime—the assassin of Marcos Arellanos, in short, Cuchillo—begged for his life. I had no power to grant it; when he cried, ‘I ask it in the name of Doña Rosarita, who loves you, for I heard—,’ the suppliant was upon the edge of a precipice. I would have pardoned him for love of you; when one of my companions precipitated him into the gulf below. A hundred times, in the silence of the night, I recalled that suppliant voice, and asked myself in anguish, What did he then hear? I ask it of you this evening, Rosarita.”
“Once, once only, did my lips betray the secret of my heart. It was here, in this very spot, when you had quitted our dwelling. I will repeat to you what I then said.”