And he seemed to mean it.  His eyes were fixed on the floor as if he were staring at his own corpse, lying there on the pavement, motionless, covered with blood, a revolver in its stiffened hand.

“Oh, no!  How horrible!  Rafael, my Rafael!” Leonora groaned, clasping him around the neck, hanging upon him in terror.

Her lover continued to protest.  He was free.  Had he been a married man; if, in his flight, he were leaving a wife behind to cry betrayal, or children calling for his help in vain, it would all be a different matter.  She could properly feel the repugnance of a kind heart unwilling that love should mean a shattered home!  But whom was he abandoning?  A mother, who, in a short time, would find consolation in the thought that he was well and happy, a mother jealous of any rivalry in her son’s affection, and to that jealousy willing to sacrifice his very happiness!  Any harm an elopement would bring would by no means be irreparable.  No, they must go away together, parade their love through the whole world!

But Leonora, lowering her head again, repeated feebly: 

“No, my mind is made up.  I must go alone.  I haven’t the strength to face a mother’s hatred.”

Rafael flushed indignantly: 

“Why not say outright that you don’t love me.  You’re tired of me, and of this environment.  The hankering for your old life has come over you again; your old world is calling!”

The actress fixed her great, luminous, tear-stained eyes upon him.  And they were filled with tenderness and pity.

“Tired of you!...  When I have never felt such desperation as tonight!  You say I want my old life back.  You don’t realize that to leave here seems like entering a den of torture....  Oh, dear heart, you’ll never know how much I love you.”

“Well, then ...?”

And to tell everything, to spare no detail of the danger he would face after separation, Rafael spoke of the life he would lead alone with his mother in that dull, unspeakable city.  Leonora was assuming that affection played some part in his mother’s indignant opposition.  Well, dona Bernarda did love him—­agreed:  he was her only son; but ambition was the decisive thing in her schemes, her passion for the aggrandizement of the House—­the controlling motive of her whole life.  She was openly, frankly, using him as security in an alliance she was planning with a great fortune.  She wanted to marry him to money:  and if Leonora were to go, if he were left alone, forsaken, then despair—­and time, which can do all things—­would break his will; and eventually he would succumb, like a victim at the altar, who, in his terror and abasement, does not sense the real significance of the sacrifice forced upon him.

The words reached a jealous spot in Leonora’s heart.  All the scattered rumors that had come to her ears in former days now echoed in her memory.  She knew that Rafael was telling the truth.  The man she loved, given away by his mother—­to another woman!...  Lost forever if she lost him now!...  And her eyes opened wide with horror and revulsion.