But soon the windows of the east were closed; the huge,ñaltaMartayMarí thick clouds which had stood out separate, allowing the light to pass, once more made one unbroken mass, by the impulse of some breath of air, and the rosy flush faded away. In their place remained a uniform pallid light, which, little by little, spread over the heavens, lazily struggling with the shadows in the west. The far-away reflections on the river likewise died out, leaving it all a monotonous color, like unpolished steel. The boudoir slowly filled with light; the pretty articles of furniture, and the objects adorning it, emerged from the obscurity, graceful, dainty, and fascinating, like the dancers in the opera, when at an outburst from the orchestra they throw aside the spectral mantles in which they had wrapped themselves. The light, however, did not smile; all the time it grew more melancholy and forbidding. Across the mighty masses of dark violet cloud which were rising above the four or five houses of El Moral, others, small and white, began to fly like wisps of gauze--a sure sign of storm.
Maria quickly felt the pane against which she was leaning tremble. A gust of wind and rain had savagely lashed the window. She stepped back a little and saw that all the panes were weeping at once. For some little time she occupied herself in watching the more or less rapid and uneven course which the drops of water followed as they rolled down the smooth surface of the glass. The sharp, intermittent pattering of the rain brought back to her memory the many afternoons that she had spent near that same window listening to it with an open book in her hand. The book had always been a novel. For more than four months she had incessantly begged her father to let her have the use of the boudoir in the tower so that she might give herself up entirely to her favorite occupation without fear of any one interrupting her. But Don Mariano feared to give his permission, because the apartments in the tower were cold, and the girl's health was delicate. At last, overcome by her entreaties and caresses, he yielded, after having the rooms carefully carpeted, and exacting the condition that Genoveva should sleep near by. It was a happy period for Maria. She was sixteen, and her mind was restless and high-spirited. Her music, in which she had made prodigious strides, had stimulated in her heart a decided tendency to melancholy and tears. She wept at the slightest provocation, sometimes without reason, and when it was least expected, but her tears were so sweet, and she experienced such intense pleasure in them, that on many occasions she fostered them artificially. How many times, gazing from that window upon the delicate clouds of the horizon tinted with rose or the last splendors of the dying sun, she felt her heart overcome by a depth of melancholy which found relief only in sobs! How many times she had pained her father with a storm of tears, the cause of which she could not tell, because she herself knew not! The knowledge of painting, in which she also excelled, turned her inclinations towards light and a wide outlook, and this equally contributed to make her long for the rooms in the tower. When once she had taken her quarters there with her piano, her paints, and her novels, Maria looked upon herself as the most fortunate girl on earth. If at noon of some magnificent sunny day, under an effulgent azure sky, she opened all the windows of her boudoir and admitted the fresh, keen wind which toyed with her hair and scattered the papers from the table over the floor, she imagined with delight that she had mounted upon a star, and that she was in the midst of space, swimming through the air at the mercy of every chance. And this illusion, though it was hard for her to keep it up, made her happy. Sometimes at night she used to open the blinds and light not only her lamp, but all the candles in the candlesticks, so as to imagine that she was stationed in a lofty lighthouse. "From the river this tower must seem like a beacon, and my room the lamp which has just been lighted," was what she used to say, in childish delight. And then she began to peer through the panes to see if any ship were on its way down to El Moral, until, frightened by the darkness without and dazzled by the light within, she finally grew terror-stricken at such an illumination and hastened to extinguish the lights.