“I feared to tell her that I loved her.  But I did do it, I scarcely know how.  The softest whisper seemed too loud against her glowing cheek.  She trembled from head to foot.  I was faint and silent with rapture when she first put her little hand in mine, and suffered me to draw her to my heart.  Ah!  I am sick with joy yet when I think of it.  I—­I first, I alone, woke that sweet young heart to life.  She is lost, lost to me, but no one else can ever be to her what I have been.”

And here Petralto, giving full sway to his impassioned Southern nature, covered his face with his hands and wept hot, regretful tears.

Tears come like blood from men of cold, strong temperaments, but they were the natural relief of Petralto’s.  I let him weep.  In a few minutes he leaped up, and began pacing the room rapidly as he went on: 

“Mr. Lorimer received my proposal with a dour, stiff refusal that left me no hope of any relenting.  ‘He had reasons, more than one,’ he said; ’he was not saying anything against either my Spanish blood or my religion; but it was no fault in a Scotsman to mate his daughter with people of her own kith.’

“There was no quarrel, and no discourtesy; but I saw I could bend an iron bar with my pleadings just as soon as his determination.  Jessy received orders not to meet me or speak to me alone; and the possibility of disobeying her father’s command never suggested itself to her.  Even I struggled long with my misery before I dared to ask her to practice her first deceit.

“She would not meet me alone, but she persuaded her mother to come once with her to our usual tryst in the wood.  Mrs. Lorimer spoke kindly but hopelessly, and covered her own face to weep while Jessy and I took of each other a passionate farewell.  I promised her then never to marry anyone else; and she!—­I thought her heart would break as I laid her almost fainting in her mother’s arms.

“Yet I did not know how much Jessy really was to me until I suddenly found out that her father had sent her back to Scotland, under the pretence of finishing her education.  I had been so honorably considerate of Jessy’s Puritan principles that I felt this hasty, secret movement exceedingly unkind and unjust.  Guadalupe became hateful to me, the duties of the ranch distracting; and my brother Felix returning about this time, we made a division of the estate.  He remained at the Garcia mansion, I rented out my possessions, and went, first to New Orleans, and afterward to New York.

“In New York I opened a studio, and one day a young gentleman called and asked me to draw a picture from some crude, imperfect sketch which a friend had made.  During the progress of the picture he frequently called in.  For some reason or other—­probably because we were each other’s antipodes in tastes and temperament—­he became my enthusiastic admirer, and interested himself greatly to secure me a lucrative patronage.