Beatriz, therefore, was right in feeling that the Being who had made the human heart and given it the capacity of loving, intended that it should love; that he had not given affections and the affinities of soul to either sex, to be a torment from want of the very object which He had made that man might not be _Alone_. And alone must be man or woman into whose heart enter no sympathies, responding to their own. If Adam had his mate, so has each son of his, by the same great law of Nature. God chose for Adam, but he gave to his children a delicate heritage of instincts and emotions of commingled matter and spirit, which were to be their guides towards finding the other being who is to complete their unity. That Olmedo was to her that being and she to him, Beatriz now knew full well. Her past life, with all that she had gained in character through him, and all she had enjoyed in feeling, the repose of perfect trust in his truth, the delicacy of his deportment, which, whether as confessor or friend, had always sought her highest good, all came back to her as a new revelation. Not that a single word of love had ever passed between them, or a single action, which angels might not have witnessed, escaped him. Both had been in too full enjoyment of that calm but unconscious love that springs from a mutual, mental and spiritual adaptation, without the suggestion of a more intimate relation, until to her the pang of his supposed death, and to him the reawakening of his physical life, amid the allurements of a tropical climate, disclosed to both the full extent of their attachment.
From that moment Beatriz was wretched, because however calm her exterior, within love and conscience were in conflict. Her misery was the greater, that she must hide her secret within her own bosom. Hitherto, every doubt or struggle had been disclosed to her confessor, and in his advice or consolation she had found repose. Now, the duties of her religion required her to confess this great sin to her confessor, and seek absolution for her soul’s sake; but that confessor was the man she loved, and the confession itself, besides being forbidden by every principle of womanly feeling, might, if made to him, precipitate both into the gulf their faith told them to avoid.