Elena lay in her bed, scarcely touching food.  Poor child! her nature demanded nothing of life but love, and that denied her, she could find no reason for living.  She was not sport-loving like Joaquin, nor practical like Francisca, nor learned like Santiago, nor ambitious to dance through life like her many nieces.  She was but a clinging unreasoning creature, with warm blood and a great heart.  But she no longer prayed to have Dario given her.  It seemed to her that after such suffering her saddened and broken spirit would cast its shadows over her happiest moments, and she longed only for death.

Her mother, becoming alarmed at her increasing weakness, called in an old woman who had been midwife and doctor of the county for half a century.  She came, a bent and bony woman who must have been majestic in her youth.  Her front teeth were gone, her face was stained with dark splashes like the imprint of a pre-natal hand.  Over her head she wore a black shawl; and she looked enough like a witch to frighten her patients into eternity had they not been so well used to her.  She prodded Elena all over as if the girl were a loaf of bread and her knotted fingers sought a lump of flour in the dough.

“The heart,” she said to Dona Jacoba with sharp emphasis, her back teeth meeting with a click, as if to proclaim their existence.  “I have no herbs for that,” and she went back to her cabin by the ocean.

That night Elena lifted her head suddenly.  From the hill opposite her window came the sweet reverberation of a guitar:  then a voice, which, though never heard by her in song before, was as unmistakable as if it had serenaded beneath her window every night since she had known Dario Castanares.

  EL ULTIMO ADIOS

  “Si dos con el alma
  Se amaron en vida,
  Y al fin se separan
  En vida las dos;
  Sabeis que es tan grande
  Le pena sentida
  Que con esa palabra
  Se dicen adios. 
  Y en esa palabra
  Que breve murmura,
  Ni verse prometen
  Niamarse se juran;
  Que en esa palabra
  Se dicen adios. 
  No hay queja mas honda,
  Suspiro mas largo;
  Que aquellas palabras
  Que dicen adios. 
  Al fin ha llegado,
  La muerte en la vida;
  Al fin para entrambos
  Muramos los dos: 
  Al fin ha llegado
  La hora cumplida,
  Del ultimo adios. 
  Ya nunca en la vida,
  Gentil companera
  Ya nunca volveremos
  A vernos los dos: 
  Por eso es tan triste
  Mi acento postrere,
  Por eso es tan triste
  El ultimo adios.”—­

They were dancing downstairs; laughter floated through the open windows.  Francisca sang a song of the bull-fight, in her strong high voice; the frogs chanted their midnight mass by the creek in the willows; the coyotes wailed; the owls hooted.  But nothing could drown that message of love.  Elena lit a candle and held it at arm’s length before the window.  She knew that its ray went straight through the curtains to the singer on the hill, for his voice broke suddenly, then swelled forth in passionate answer.  He sat there until dawn singing to her; but the next night he did not come, and Elena knew that she had not been his only audience.