With Beatriz the struggle was different. She made no pretence to conceal what was longer impossible, but waited with quickened pulse and tremulous feeling, to hear him break the silence. His mental agony was perfectly intelligible to her. Without analyzing as he did the circumstances of their position, they flooded her heart like a spring freshet. It might break, but she would give no sigh that should tempt him from his holy allegiance. Once his decision made, her heart was wholly his, either to sustain him in duty, or to share his lot. With Ruth she would have said, “Entreat me not to leave thee, nor to return from following after thee, for whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge.” How long they wandered thus, or how far, neither could realize, for every step was as if a millstone were tied to their heels. In their doubt and conflict the landscape, so joyous in itself, seemed overspread with gloom. The very sun, as it stole through the thick verdure overhead, shot upon them cold and mocking rays—light without warmth. Heaven was darkened, and the earth gave them no rest.
At last they sat down; Beatriz on a log, and Olmedo at her feet. Around and over them rose a rural bower, carpeted with soft mosses and canopied with vines, fragrant in blossoms and flowers. The birds warbled melodiously even at noon-day in this shady retreat. Near by, flowed a little brook with gentle murmurings, a vein of life coursing through the green sward, on its way to a torrent stream that thundered far below. Through an opening in the trees, mountain-ward in the far distance could be seen the glassy curve of the cataract which fed both. Rising from its mist, enclosing in its hollow the entire gorge from which it issued, was a perfect rainbow, forming a frame of wondrous beauty to nature’s painting. On the opposite side, glimmering through the forests like a silver horizon, was the ocean, its waves sparkling and dancing in the bright sun as the fresh trade-wind swept over it, and, cooled by its breath, came stealing with soft notes and reviving breeze through every leafy cranny of the dense jungle. The quick darting, bright eyed lizards, crept out of their holes and played about their human friends, sure that they had nothing to fear from them. Adam and Eve when they slept in Paradise, were not more alone with the communings of nature than were apparently this pair. A scene more soothing, since its gates were closed upon our race, the earth had never offered to mankind. Yet for a while it was unheeded, for the eyes of both were turned within; gradually, however, its beauties dawned upon them. They looked around. Beatriz first spoke. “Olmedo,” she said, “does not God reign here? How beautiful is this landscape? how filled with repose; all nature is hushed in harmony. Why is it we alone are unhappy?”