The day ended at last and was succeeded by the idleness of Sunday.  A sort of listless indifference came over Orsino, the reaction, no doubt, after all the excitement through which he had passed.  It seemed to him that Maria Consuelo had never loved him, and that it was better after all that she should be gone.  He longed for the old days, indeed, but as she now appeared to him in his meditations he did not wish her back.  He had no desire to renew the uncertain struggle for a love which she denied in the end; and this mood showed, no doubt, that his own passion was less violent than he had himself believed.  When a man loves with his whole nature, undividedly, he is not apt to submit to separations without making a strong effort to reunite himself, by force, persuasion or stratagem, with the woman who is trying to escape from him.  Orsino was conscious of having at first felt the inclination to make such an attempt even more strongly than he had shown it, but he was conscious also that the interval of two days had been enough to reduce the wish to follow Maria Consuelo in such a way that he could hardly understand having ever entertained it.

Unsatisfied passion wears itself out very soon.  The higher part of love may and often does survive in such cases, and the passionate impulses may surge up after long quiescence as fierce and dangerous as ever.  But it is rarely indeed that two unsatisfied lovers who have parted by the will of the one or of both can meet again without the consciousness that the experimental separation has chilled feelings once familiar and destroyed illusions once more than dear.  In older times, perhaps, men and women loved differently.  There was more solitude in those days than now, for what is called society was not invented, and people generally were more inclined to sadness from living much alone.  Melancholy is a great strengthener of faithfulness in love.  Moreover at that time the modern fight for life had not begun, men as a rule had few interests besides love and war, and women no interests at all beyond love.  We moderns should go mad if we were suddenly forced to lead the lives led by knights and ladies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  The monotonous round of such an existence in time of peace would make idiots of us, the horrors of that old warfare would make many of us maniacs.  But it is possible that youths and maidens would love more faithfully and wait longer for each other than they will or can to-day.  It is questionable whether Bayard would have understood a single page of a modern love story, Tancred would certainly not have done so; but Caesar would have comprehended our lives and our interests without effort, and Catullus could have described us as we are, for one great civilization is very like another where the same races are concerned.