At seven on the following evening, Tito and Elena were married at a beautiful country-house belonging to the new Count and Duke, at the mouth of the Guadarrama River.
At half-past seven the guests returned to Madrid, and the newly wedded couple were left alone in the midst of a luxuriant garden.
Tito had not again seen Death, and I might terminate this history here; but just at this point it commences to be interesting and lucid.
CHAPTER XII.
THE SUN IN THE WEST.
Tito and Elena, loving each other, belonging to one another, were at last free and alone.
The remembrances of their infancy, the desires of their hearts, the will of their parents, fortune, birth, the blessing of God, all aided in uniting them; and those two forever inseparable souls, lost at last, in this solemn and mystical hour, their sad and solitary individuality, and merged themselves into an endless, happy future, as two rivers, rising in the same mountain, and separated from each other in their tortuous courses, reunite and identify themselves in the infinite solitude of the ocean.
It was evening. It did not seem like the evening of a single day, but as of that of the world’s existence, the evening of all Time since creation. The sun sank slowly in the west, the splendid lights gilding the front of the villa, and penetrating through the tender green foliage of a spreading vine, a sort of canopy which sheltered the newly wedded pair.