They were in the cloister leaning on the balustrade; below was the dark garden with its waving branches, above a summer sky veiled by the heat haze which dulled the brightness of the stars.  They were alone in the four-sided gallery.  The lighted windows of the Chapel-master’s little room threw a square of red on the opposite roofs.  They could hear the harmonium playing slowly and sadly, and when it stopped the shadow of the musician passed and repassed over the square of light with his nervous gestures, which, enlarged by the reflection, appeared the most grotesque contortions.

The nocturnal calm and darkness surrounded Gabriel and Sagrario with a gentle caress; that mysterious freshness was falling from above which seems to revive drooping spirits and magnify old remembrances.  The Church seemed to them as an immense sleeping beast, in whose lap they had found peace and protection.

Gabriel spoke of his past, in order to convince the young woman that his work in the Cathedral would not be very arduous.  He had suffered much; there was no bitterness that he had not tasted; he had endured hunger, terrible hunger, in his peregrinations through the world.  He did not know which were the most painful, his martyrdom in the dungeons of the gloomy castle, or his days of despair in the streets of crowded cities, seeing food and gold through the glass windows of the shops while his head was swimming with the dizziness of hunger.  He could endure his misery while he wandered alone through the cruel selfishness of civilisation; but the most horrible days were those in which he shared his vagabond poverty with Lucy, his gentle and melancholy companion.

Gabriel spoke of the Englishwoman as of a dead sister.

“Had you known her, Sagrario, you would have loved her.  She was a strong woman, a brave companion, united to me more by the community of thought than by carnal attraction.  I loved her when I first saw her.  I hardly know if it was love that we felt; poets have written so many lies about love, and have falsified it in such an exaggerated way, that I do not for certain know what it is.”

He spoke to the young woman of love, explaining it according to his beliefs.  Goethe had defined it as an “elective affinity,” speaking as a man of science and not as a poet, using the term that chemistry gives to the tendency of two substances to unite and form a distinct product.  Two beings between whom no affinity existed could meet through false laws of life in perpetual contact, but they could not mix or merge into one another.  This happened more often than not between the individuals of different sexes who peopled the earth; a passing sentimentality could exist, or carnal caprice, but seldom love.  The poor invalid Lucy was his affinity; they met and they loved.  In their pity for human miseries, their hatred of inequalities and injustice, their self-abnegation in the cause of the humble and unfortunate they were equal; they were not only united by their hearts but by their brains.