She regarded him in wonder. "Hopeless, Cristoval?" she asked, in a voice so low that he barely heard it, and the question threw him off his guard. He answered it quickly and desperately, and in giving voice to the torture of his soul for weeks, forgot to be impersonal. "Hopeless!" he repeated, turning away again. "How else? What art thou?—a princess. And I?—" He stopped. When he looked again his eyes met that in hers which a lover should be willing to give his life to see. Darkened by the moonlight, they regarded him with strange, intent abstraction, serious, gentle, and ineffably fond. This time Cristoval did not turn away. He must have been more than human—or less—to have turned away. For an instant, as a drowning man reviews a lifetime, he had a hundred thoughts of deprecation, each a stab. He spurned them. The dross of common things faded into due perspective. The world’s cares and dangers grew shadowy. His hands sought hers. As they yielded, the deep eyes deepened, and her lips parted with a sigh, almost a sob. The _tinya_ had slipped to the ground at their feet. Rava unclasped her hands from his neck and drew back her head to look into his eyes. "Ah, Cristoval, then thou canst love?—truly, thou canst love, and dost love me?" Cristoval kissed the upturned lips and eyes and brow. "God knoweth I love thee, Rava, and have loved thee long. I had not purposed to tell thee." "That would have been wrong and cruel," said Rava. "Why wouldst thou not have told me?" "I thought we must part, my own, and would have spared thee an aching heart." "Thou wouldst have denied me the only solace for a broken heart," she sighed, clinging more closely. "But now, we shall never part, Cristoval." "Never! Never, with the help of Heaven!" he whispered. But at length, the leave-taking for the night. A score of leave-takings before the last wafted kiss from her doorway, and the beloved form vanished in its shadow. Then Cristoval, alone, sought to realize his happiness. In his room he raised his sword, and kissed its hilt—the soldier’s cross. Ware happiness complete! Evil hath no harbinger more sure. Their glimpse of it was fleeting, as always. Even while they dreamed it would endure, the blow was falling. One day, a second, and a third—days with hours like minutes, speeding on so quickly to the evening, the evening so quickly into night, that the lovers seemed hardly met before it was time to part again and lie in fevered longing for the dawn, each with a thousand thoughts untold. Ah, Time! Capricious, perverse and always cruel; swift as light when the moments are of joy; grudging and niggardly in their measure when mortals would have them long; but unsparing, lavish, prodigal, when thou metest hours of sorrow!