will laugh within you—unless indeed you are meditating on the insects you can see with your microscope, and which you believe to be the cause of thought and sentiment in our souls, and which I believe to be divine.”
“Your sarcasms cannot touch me,” said her husband. “I know too well the source of these ignorant prejudices. I can only pledge myself to honest and reverent attention.—But I was forgetting another matter. You will have to quit Madrid; we must go to live elsewhere. Now take your choice.”
“You ask too much—it is a shame!” cried María in the voice of a spoilt child. “And what do you offer in return? A sham of religion, a mask of belief to cover your infidel’s face! No, Leon; I cannot agree.”
“Then there is no hope for me,” cried Leon burying his head in his hands. After a few minutes of silent anguish, he coldly looked up at his wife and went on:
“María, then we must live apart. I cannot endure this existence. Within a few days it shall be settled. You can remain in this house or go to your parents, which ever you prefer; I shall go abroad, never to return—never.”
He rose; his wife, after the manner of fashionable wives, burst into tears, seizing his hands and pressing them to her breast.
“We must part?” she sobbed. “But you are mad—cruel....” María’s love for her husband was as great as his for her—a gulf, an absolute divorce of their souls she could bear, but to live apart...!
“My mind is quite made up,” said Leon sadly.
“I agree—I consent to all you propose.”
Long after, when she had been sleeping for some hours, again Leon heard his wife wake with a cry of horror.
“I have been dreaming again—a horrible dream. I was dying and again I saw you—you were caressing and kissing another woman.—But it is daylight; the bells are really ringing now.”
The air was in fact full of the discordant jangle and clang of bells from the towers of the numberless stuccoed and whitewashed structures which, in Madrid, boast of the name of churches, and bear witness to the piety of the natives.
“They are ringing for Matins,” thought María, “I am dying of sleepiness—I must sleep. It is eight o’clock and still they ring, still they call me.—But I cannot go—I have given my word. Heavens! it is nine! Forgive me—spare me, beloved bells; I cannot go till Sunday.”
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