Many and strange thoughts rushed through Agueda's brain during those blissful hours. Life began for her then, and she found it well worth living. She awoke. Her child's heart sprang into full being, to lie dormant never again. Nada's words came back to her. She did not wish to recall them, but they forced themselves upon her: "Never trust a gentleman, Agueda; he will only betray you."
"I should think much of your warning, Nada," thought Agueda, "if I saw other gentlemen. I never do see them. If I do, he will protect me." The danger had not arrived. It could never come now. She had found her bulwark and her defence.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Pronounced E-see-dro.
II
"When the flood has subsided," Agueda had said to herself, "all will be as before. But stay! Would anything ever be as before? Well, what matter? Who would go back? Shall we not trust those whom we love? Life is the better for it. This was life. Life was all happiness, all joy. The future? There was to be no future but this. This life of hers and his should be the same until death claimed the one or the other. God grant that they might go together, rather than that one should be left behind. Let them go in a greater flood, perhaps, than the one which they had outspent upon the thatched roof in the shelter of the old chimenea."
Agueda knew not the meaning of those words of calculation—"the world." She had never known the world, she had never seen the world. She found herself living as many did about her. Only that they had heart-burnings, jealousies, disappointments, and sorrows. She was secure, and she pitied them that their lots had not been cast within so safe a fold as hers. Her nature, if ignorant, was undefiled and undepraved; and noble, in that she found no sacrifice too great for this splendid young god who claimed her. What else was her mission in life but to make his life as near Heaven as earthly existence could become? She stretched out her young arms to the sky with a glow of happiness that asked nothing further of God. There were the mountains, the fields, the forests, the plantations, the river, and the rambling, thatched casa. These made for her the world.