And, in an impulse of dread, she nestled closer against his breast, sank her hands into his hair, lifted her head back to kiss him avidly on the face, the forehead, the eyes, the lips, nibbling playfully, tenderly at his nose and chin, yet with an affectionate vehemence that drew cries of mock protest from Rafael.

“Madcap!” he muttered, smiling.  “You’re hurting me.”

Leonora looked steadily at him out of her two great eyes that were a-gleam with love.

“I could eat you up,” she murmured.  “I feel like devouring you, my heaven, my king, my god....  What have you given me, tell me, little boy?  How have you been able to fascinate me, make me feel a passion that I never, never felt before?”

And again they fell asleep.

Rafael stirred in his lover’s arms, and suddenly sat up.

“It must be late.  How many hours have we been here, do you suppose?”

“Many, many hours,” Leonora answered sadly.  “Hours of happiness always go so fast.”

It was still dark.  The moon had set.  They arose and, hand in hand, groping their way along, they reached the boat.  The splash of the oars began again to sound along the dark stream.

Suddenly the nightingale again piped gloomily in the willow wood, as if in farewell to a departing dream.

“Listen, my darling,” said Leonora.  “The poor little fellow is bidding us good-bye.  Just hear how plaintively he says farewell.”

And in the strange exhiliration that comes from fatigue, Leonora felt the flames of art flaring up within her, seething through her organism from head to foot.

A melody from Die Meistersinger came to her mind, the hymn that the good people of Nuremberg sing when Hans Sachs, their favorite singer, as bounteous and gentle as the Eternal Father, steps out on the platform for the contest in poetry.  It was the song that the poet-minstrel, the friend of Albrecht Duerer, wrote in honor of Luther when the great Reformation broke; and the prima donna, rising to her feet in the stern, and returning the greeting of the nightingale began: 

“Sorgiam, che spunta il dolce albor, cantar ascolto in mezzo ai fior voluttuoso un usignol spiegando a noi l’amante vol!...”

Her ardent, powerful voice seemed to make the dark surface of the river tremble; it rolled in harmonious waves across the fields, and died away in the foliage of the distant island, whence the nightingale trilled an answer that was like a fainting sigh.  Leonora tried to reproduce with her lips the majestic sonorousness of the Wagnerian chorus, mimicking the rumbling accompaniment of the orchestra, while Rafael beat the water with his oars in time with the pious, exalted melody with which the great Master had turned to popular poetry adequately to greet the outbreak of Reform.