Mariquilla's lips quivered in a half disdainful smile. Augustine, tormented doubtless by painful feeling, remained silent, his brow leant upon the hands of his sweetheart. Gruesome shapes of dread raised themselves threateningly between them. With the eyes of the soul he and she beheld them, filled with fear. After a long pause, Augustine lifted his face. "Mariquilla, why are you silent? Tell me." "Why are you silent, Augustine?" "What are you thinking about?" "What are you thinking about?" "I am thinking that God will protect us," said the young man. "When the siege is ended, we will marry. If you wish to leave Saragossa, I will go with you wherever you wish to go. Has your father ever spoken to you of marriage?" "Never." "He shall not prevent your marrying me. My parents will oppose it; but my mind is made up. I do not understand life except through you, and if I lost you I could not exist. You are the supreme necessity of my soul. Without you I should be like the universe without light. No human power shall separate us as long as you love me. This conviction is so rooted in me that if I should ever think that we must be separated in life, it would be to me as if all nature were overthrown. _I_ without _you!_ That seems to me the wildest of ideas. I without you! What madness, what absurdity! It is like the sea on the top of the mountains, like the snow in the depths of the ocean. It is like rivers running through the sky, and the stars made into fiery powder in the deserts of the earth. It is as if the trees should talk, and man should live among metals and precious stones in the bowels of the earth. I am a coward at times, and I tremble, thinking of the obstacles that seem overwhelming before us; but the confidence that fills my spirit, like faith in holy things, reanimates me. If sometimes for a moment I fear death, afterwards a secret voice tells me that I shall not die as long as you are alive. Do you see all the destruction made by the siege which we are enduring? Do you see how the bombs and shells shower about us, and how numbers of my companions fall never to rise? Yet, except momentarily, none of this causes me any fear. I believe that the Virgin del Pilar keeps death away from me. Your sensitiveness keeps you in constant communion with the angels of heaven. You are an angel of heaven, and loving you and being loved by you gives me a divine power against which the forces of man avail nothing." Augustine went on for a long time in this strain, pouring out from his over-flowing fancy the love and the superstitions which held him in thrall.