“What do I care for their gossip” he once said to Leonora.  “I love you so much that I’d like to see the whole city worship you in public.  I’d like to snatch you up in my arms, and appear upon the bridge at high noon, before a concourse stupefied by your beauty:  ’Am I or am I not your “quefe"?’ I’d ask.  ’Well, if I am, adore this woman, who is my very soul and without whom I could not live.  The affection which you have for me you must have also for her.’  And I’d do just as I say if it were possible.”

“Silly boy ... adorable child,” she had replied, showering him with kisses, brushing his dark beard with her soft, quivering lips.

And it was during one of their meetings—­when their words were broken by sudden impulses of affection, and their lips were tightly pressed together—­that Leonora had expressed her capricious desire.

“I’m stifling in this house.  I hate to caress you inside four walls, as if you were only a passing whim.  This is unworthy of you.  You are Love, who came to seek me out on the most beautiful of nights.  I like you better in the open air.  You look more handsome to me then, and I feel younger.”

And recalling those trips down the river about which Rafael had told her so many times when they were only friends—­that islet with its curtains of reeds, the willows bending over the water and the nightingale singing from its hiding-place—­she had asked him, eagerly: 

“What night are you going to take me there?  It’s a whim of mine, a wild idea; but, what does love exist for, if not to make people do the foolish things that sweeten life?...  Carry me off in your boat!  The bark that bore you there will transport the two of us to your enchanted island; we will spend the whole night in the open air.”

And Rafael, who was flattered by the idea of taking his love publicly down the river, through the slumbering countryside, unfastened his boat at midnight under the bridge and rowed it to a canebrake near Leonora’s orchard.

An hour later they emerged through the opening in the hedge, arm in arm, laughing at the mischievous escapade, disturbing the majestic silence of the landscape with noisy, insolent kisses.

They got into the boat, and with a favoring current, began to descend the Jucar, lulled by the murmur of the river as it glided between the high mudbanks covered with reeds that bent low over the water and formed mysterious hiding places.

Leonora clapped her hands with delight.  She threw over her neck the silk shawl with which she had covered her head.  She unbuttoned her light traveling coat, and inhaled with deep enjoyment the moist, somewhat muggy breeze that was curling along the surface of the river.  Her hand trembled as it dipped into the water from time to time.