And, Leonora was thrilled as she heard in her memory the murmur of the orchestra accompanying the song of tenderness inspired by Spring; the rustle of the forest branches benumbed by the winter, now swaying with the new sap that had flowed into them like a torrent of vitality; and out on the brightly lighted plazoleta she could almost see Sigmund and Siglinda clasping in an eternal unseverable embrace, as she had seen them from the wings of the opera, where she would be waiting as a Valkyrie to step out and set an audience wild with her mighty “Hojotoho!"

She was feeling the same loneliness and yearning that Sigmund felt in Hunding’s hovel.  Without a family, without a home, wandering over the world, she longed for someone to lean on, someone to clasp tenderly to her heart!  And it was she who unconsciously, instinctively, had drawn closer to Rafael, and placed her hand in his.

She was ill.  She sighed softly with the appealing entreaty of a child, as if the intense poetry of that memory of music had shattered the frail remnant of will that had kept her mistress of herself.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-night.  I feel as though I were dying....  But such a sweet death!  So sweet!...  What madness, Rafael!  How rash it was of us to have seen each other on such a night!...”

And with supplicating eyes, as if entreating forgiveness, she gazed out into the majestic moonlight, where the silence seemed to be stirring with the palpitation of a new life.  She could divine that something was dying within her, that her will lay prostrate on the ground, without strength to defend itself.

Rafael, too, was overwhelmed.  He held her clasped against his breast, one of her hands in his.  She was weak, languid, will-less, incapable of resistance; yet he did not feel the brutal passion of the previous meeting; he did not dare to move.  A sense of infinite tenderness came over him.  All he yearned for was to sit there hour after hour in contact with that beautiful form, clasping her tightly to him, making her one with him, as a jewel-case might guard a jewel.

He whispered mysteriously into her ear, hardly knowing what he was saying; tender words that seemed to be coming from someone within him, thrilling him with a tingling, suffocating passion as they left his lips.

Yes, it was true; that night was the night dreamed of by the immortal Poet; the wedding night of smiling Youth and of martial May in his armor of flowers.  The fields were quivering voluptuously under the rays of the moon; and they, two young hearts, feeling the flutter of Love’s wings about their hair, why should they sit unresponsive there, blind to the beauty of the night, deaf to the infinite caress that was echoing from all around?

“Leonora!  Leonora!” moaned Rafael.

He had slipped down from the bench.  Before he was aware of it, he found himself kneeling at her feet, clutching her hands, and thrusting his face upward without daring to reach her lips.