How beautiful it was!  All by themselves, and wandering about, as if the world did not exist; as if all Nature belonged to them, to them alone!  Here they were, slipping past clusters of slumbering houses, leaving the city far behind.  And nobody had suspected that passion, which in its enthusiasm had broken its chains and left its mysterious lair to have the heavens and the fields for sympathetic witnesses.  Leonora would have wished that the night should never end; that the waning moon, which seemed to have been slashed by a sword, should stop eternally in the sky to wrap them forever in its feeble, dying light; that the river should be endless, and the boat float on and on until, overwhelmed by so much love, they should breathe the last gasp of life away in a kiss as tenuous as a sigh.

“If you could only know how grateful I am to you for this excursion, Rafael!...  I’m happy, so happy.  Never have I had such a night as this.  But where is the island?  Have we gone astray, as you did the night of the flood?”

No!  At last they reached the place.  There Rafael had spent many an afternoon hidden in the bushes, cut off by the encircling waters, dreaming that he was an adventurer on the virgin prairies or the vast rivers of America, performing exploits he had read about in the novels of Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid.

A tributary joined the Jucar at this point, emptying gently into the main stream from under a thicket of reeds and trees that formed a triumphal arch of foliage.  At the confluence rose the island—­a tiny piece of land almost level with the water, but as fresh as green and fragrant as an aquatic bouquet.  The banks were lined with dense clumps of cane, and a few willows that bent their hairy foliage low over the water, forming dark vaults through which the boat could make its way.

The two lovers entered the shade.  The curtain of branches concealed them from the river; a bare tear of moonlight managed to filter through the mane of willows.

Leonora felt a first sense of uneasiness in this dark, damp, cave-like haunt.  Invisible animals took to the water with dull splashes as they heard the boat’s bow touch the mud of the bank.  The actress clutched her lover’s arm with nervous pleasure.

“Here we are,” murmured Rafael.  “Hold on to something and get out.  Careful, careful!  Don’t you want to hear the nightingale?  Here we have him.  Listen.”

It was true.  In one of the willows, at the other side of the island, the mysterious bird was trilling from his hiding place, a dizzying shower of notes, which broke at the crescendo of the musical whirl-pool into a plaint as soft and long-sustained as a golden thread stretched in the silence of the night across the river, that seemed to be applauding with its hushed murmur.  To get nearer, the lovers went up through the rushes, stopping, bending over at each step, to keep the branches from crackling underneath their feet.