He told her of the image he nourished in his sadness.  Love!  The Love that passes but once in a lifetime, crowned with flowers, and followed by a retinue of kisses and laughter.  And whosoever follows him in obedience, finds happiness at the end of the joyous pathway; but whosoever, through pride or selfishness, lags by the wayside, comes to lament his folly and to expiate his cowardice in an everlasting life of tedium and sorrow!  He had sinned, grievously.  That he would confess!  But could she not forgive him?  He had paid for his deliquency with eight long, monotonous, crushing, meaningless years, one suffocating stifling night that never broke into morning.  But they had met again!  There was still time, Leonora!  They could still call back the Springtime of their lives, make it burgeon anew, compel Love to retrace his footsteps, pass their way again, stretching forth his sweet hands of youth to them!

The actress was listening with a smile upon her lips, her eyes closed, her head thrown back in the carriage.  It was an expression of intense pleasure, as if she were tasting with delight the fire of love that was still burning in Rafael, and that, to her, meant vengeance.

The horses were proceeding at a walk along la Castellana.  Other carriages were going by and the people in them peered back at the coach with that beautiful, unknown woman.

“What is your answer, Leonora?  We can still be happy!  Forget the past and the wrong I did you!  Imagine it was only yesterday that we said good-bye in the orchard, and that we are meeting again today to begin our lives over again from the beginning, to live together always, always.”

“No,” she replied coldly.  “You yourself just said so:  Love passes but once in a lifetime.  I know that from cruel experience.  I have done my best to forget.  No, Love has passed us by!  It would be sheer folly for us to ask him to hunt us up again.  He never comes back!  Our most desperate effort could revive barely the shadow of him.  You let him escape.  Well, you must weep for your loss, just as I had to weep for your baseness ...  Besides, you don’t realize the situation we are in now!  Don’t you remember what we talked about on our first night there in the moonlight?  ’The arrogant month of May, the young warrior in an armor of flowers, seeks out his beloved, Youth.’  Well, where is our youth now?  Quite frankly, you can find mine on my dressing-table!  I buy it at the perfumer’s; and though that gentleman is quite skilled at disguising me, there’s an oldness of the spirit underneath, a terrible thing I don’t dare think about, because it frightens me so.  And yours, poor Rafael—­you just haven’t any, not even the kind you can buy!  Take a good look at yourself!  You’re ugly, to put it mildly, my dear boy!  You’re lost that attractive slimness of your younger days.  Your dreams make me laugh!  A passion at this late date!  The idyll of a middle-aged siren and a bald-headed father of a litter of children, with a paunch, with a paunch, with a paunch!  Oh, Rafael!  Ha, ha, ha!”