Gabriel wept, remembering their last interview in an Italian hospital, clean and sweet, but with the frozen atmosphere of charity.  As he was not her husband he could only visit her twice a week.  He presented, himself ragged and downcast, seeing her in an armchair daily paler and weaker, her skin of a waxen transparency and her eyes immensely enlarged.  He knew a little about everything, and he could not conceal from himself the gravity of her illness.  She waited quietly for death.  “Bring me some roses,” she said, smiling to Gabriel, as if in the last moment of her life she wished to acknowledge the natural beauty of the world made hideous and darkened by man.  The “companion” lived on dry bread, refusing the help of his comrades only a little less poor than himself, sleeping on the ground, in order to take her on his next visit a bunch of flowers.

“She died, Sagrario,” groaned Luna, “and I know not where they buried her; possibly she may have served for a lecture at the school of anatomy; she fell into the common grave like those soldiers whose heroism remains in obscurity.  But I still see her; she has followed me in all my misfortunes, and I think she lives again in you.”

“But uncle,” said Sagrario, gently, touched by his recital, “I cannot do what she did.  I am an unhappy woman, without strength or will.”

“Call me Gabriel,” said Luna, vehemently.  “You are my Lucy, who again crosses my path; I knew it from the first, and for a long while I have been searching my feelings, analysing my will, and I have arrived at one certainty—­that I love you, Sagrario.”

The young woman made a gesture of surprise, drawing further from him.

“Do not draw away, do not fear me.  I am a feeble man, you are a weak woman; you have suffered much, and have bid good-bye to the joys of the earth, but you are strong through misfortune and can look the truth in the face.  We are both wrecks of life, and the only hope left us is to wait and die quietly in the desert island which is our refuge.  We are undone, rent and swept away; Death has laid his hand upon us; we are fallen and shapeless rags after having passed through the mills of an absurd society.  For this reason I love you, because you are my equal in misfortune; elective affinity unites us.  Poor Lucy was the work-girl enfeebled by sweating, weakened from her birth by poverty.  You were the girl of the people drawn from her home by the attraction of the well-being of the privileged; seduced, not by love, but by the caprices of the happy; the girl offered as a sacrifice to the Minotaur whose remains were afterwards thrown on to the dunghill.  I love you, Sagrario; we are two fugitives from society, whose paths must join; I am hated as dangerous, you are despised as an outcast; misfortune has laid hold on us.  Our bodies are weakened and we bear the wounds of the conquered, but before death claims us, let us make our lives sweet by love.  Let us seek for roses as did poor Lucy.”