"
"Ah silly, silly girl! know that there are no gerfalcons half so
dangerous as these young prankling pages, and it is precisely such
simple birds as thee that they pounce upon."
The aunt was at first indignant at learning that in despite of her
boasted vigilance, a tender intercourse had been carried on by the
youthful lovers, almost beneath her eye; but when she found that her
simple-hearted niece, though thus exposed, without the protection of
bolt or bar, to all the machinations of the opposite sex, had come
forth unsinged from the fiery ordeal, she consoled herself with the
persuasion that it was owing to the chaste and cautious maxims in
which she had, as it were, steeped her to the very lips.
While the aunt laid this soothing unction to her pride, the niece
treasured up the oft-repeated vows of fidelity of the page. But what
is the love of restless, roving man? A vagrant stream that dallies for
a time with each flower upon its bank, then passes on, and leaves them
all in tears.
Days, weeks, months elapsed, and nothing more was heard of the page.
The pomegranate ripened, the vine yielded up its fruit, the autumnal
rains descended in torrents from the mountains; the Sierra Nevada
became covered with a snowy mantle, and wintry blasts howled through
the halls of the Alhambra- still he came not. The winter passed
away. Again the genial spring burst forth with song and blossom and
balmy zephyr; the snows melted from the mountains, until none remained
but on the lofty summit of Nevada, glistening through the sultry
summer air.
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