Rosario felt her face burning, and her heart was beating violently.

“See, my dear cousin,” continued the young man.  “I swear to you that if you had not pleased me I should be already far away from this place.  Although politeness and delicacy would have obliged me to make an effort to conceal my disappointment, I should have found it hard to do so.  That is my character.”

“Cousin, you have only just arrived,” said Rosarito laconically, trying to laugh.

“I have only just arrived, and I already know all that I wanted to know; I know that I love you; that you are the woman whom my heart has long been announcing to me, saying to me night and day, ’Now she is coming, now she is near; now you are burning.’”

These words served Rosario as an excuse for breaking into the laugh that had been dimpling her lips.  Her soul swelled with happiness; she breathed an atmosphere of joy.

“You persist in depreciating yourself,” continued Pepe, “but for me you possess every perfection.  You have the admirable quality of radiating on all around you the divine light of your soul.  The moment one sees you one feels instinctively the nobility of your mind and the purity of your heart.  To see you is to see a celestial being who, through the forgetfulness of Heaven, remains upon the earth; you are an angel, and I adore you.”

When he had said this it seemed as if he had fulfilled an important mission.  Rosarito, overcome by the violence of her emotion, felt her scant strength suddenly fail her; and, half-fainting, she sank on a stone that in those pleasant solitudes served as a seat.  Pepe bent over her.  Her eyes were closed, her forehead rested on the palm of her hand.  A few moments later the daughter of Dona Perfecta Polentinos gave her cousin, amid happy tears, a tender glance followed by these words: 

“I loved you before I had ever seen you.”

Placing her hands in those of the young man she rose to her feet, and their forms disappeared among the leafy branches of an oleander walk.  Night was falling and soft shadows enveloped the lower end of the garden, while the last rays of the setting sun crowned the tree-tops with fleeting splendors.  The noisy republic of the birds kept up a deafening clamor in the upper branches.  It was the hour in which, after flitting about in the joyous regions of the sky, they were all going to rest, and they were disputing with one another the branches they had selected for sleeping-places.  Their chatter at times had a sound of recrimination and controversy, at times of mockery and merriment.  In their voluble twitter the little rascals said the most insulting things to each other, pecking at each other and flapping their wings, as orators wave their arms when they want to make their hearers believe the lies they are telling them.  But words of love were to be heard there too, for the peace of the hour and the beauty of the spot invited to it.  A sharp ear might have distinguished the following: