he arose from his chair pale and trembling, but he could hear the
footsteps die away and the noisy closing of the door to the street.

"Poor fellow!" he murmured, while his eyes filled with tears. Heedless
now of his studies, he let his gaze wander into space as he pondered
over the fate of those two beings: he--young, rich, educated, master
of his fortunes, with a brilliant future before him; she--fair as
a dream, pure, full of faith and innocence, nurtured amid love and
laughter, destined to a happy existence, to be adored in the family
and respected in the world; and yet of those two beings, filled with
love, with illusions and hopes, by a fatal destiny he wandered over
the world, dragged ceaselessly through a whirl of blood and tears,
sowing evil instead of doing good, undoing virtue and encouraging vice,
while she was dying in the mysterious shadows of the cloister where
she had sought peace and perhaps found suffering, where she entered
pure and stainless and expired like a crushed flower!

Sleep in peace, ill-starred daughter of my hapless fatherland! Bury
in the grave the enchantments of youth, faded in their prime! When a
people cannot offer its daughters a tranquil home under the protection
of sacred liberty, when a man can only leave to his widow blushes,
tears to his mother, and slavery to his children, you do well to
condemn yourself to perpetual chastity, stifling within you the germ
of a future generation accursed! Well for you that you have not
to shudder in your grave, hearing the cries of those who groan in
darkness, of those who feel that they have wings and yet are fettered,
of those who are stifled from lack of liberty! Go, go with your poet's
dreams into the regions of the infinite, spirit of woman dim-shadowed
in the moonlight's beam, whispered in the bending arches of the
bamboo-brakes! Happy she who dies lamented, she who leaves in the