The hardness went out of her tone, and her voice faltered as she added softly: "They told me, Antonio, that this would be your first Mass. They told me how you have fought and what you have suffered." The blue eyes which looked at him so wistfully as she spoke were the blue eyes which had brimmed with tears twenty years before when she had "cried and cried and cried like a baby" at the sight of his worn-out cloak and had sobbed: "Poor Antonio! You poor Antonio! My poor Antonio!" His heart broke at the sight. After twenty years she had come back. Amidst the old sights and sounds she was sitting hardly an arm's length from him. Isabel had come back. But in less than one little hour they must stand up for the last parting and he would never see her in this world any more. And meanwhile a frosty monster of false reserve was devouring their tiny store of golden moments one by one. Antonio sprang to his feet. "Isabel," he said desperately, "you think I didn't care. You think I never loved you. Listen. The night you went away I was ready to drop down with fatigue and hunger after riding and tramping from sunrise to sunset over the mountains. But how did I spend that dreadful night? I spent it in your chamber, kneeling on the floor against your bed, drinking deep of such anguish for you as I pray God you have never tasted for me. How did I spend the next day? Only by miracle upon miracle was I held back from thundering after you on the fleetest horse in the country-side. Hour after hour that day I tramped, tramped, tramped north, forgetting God and thinking only of you, till I came to a saint's grave." She rose hastily and raised one slender white hand, as if to ward off his burning words. But he would not be put to silence. "Call me a sentimentalist, a madman, an apostate, anything you will," he cried. "But here is the sheer truth. Whenever I sat down to eat and drink at the farm you were there, invisibly but undeniably there, sitting at my right hand. Whenever I went into my cell I heard you searching in the cupboard for something you could not find. You haunted these woods all night and all day. To enter the guest-house was like being dragged into a chamber of torture. More. Believe me or not, as you will. To-day is the first time for twenty years that I have set foot on these stones, or set eyes on yonder cascade, or touched this boulder with my hand. Isabel, in memory of you I have charged José to tend this place like a shrine; but I behold it now for the first time since I stood here, at sunrise, the day after you went away." His words burst from him like a stampede of eager, bright-eyed creatures suddenly released from long captivity. It was as though he would storm and batter down the gates of her heart and reclaim his ancient place. She recoiled from him. "No more, no more!" she cried. "I did not come for this. Antonio, in God's name, no more!"