THE CALLE DE LA CRUZ VERDE
although because of her virtue and good training she did not show it—on that very instant fell in love with him. Then he made inquiry and found that her name was Doña María de Aldarafuente y Segura. Therefore he resolved to marry her. And so, every day he rode past her balcony and looked up at her with eyes full of love. As for Doña María, she was so well brought up, and her parents watched her so narrowly, that it was a long while before she made any answering sign. And for that reason, Señor, she loved him all the more tenderly in her heart.
Then it happened, at the end of a long while, that Doña María's mother fell ill; and so, the watch upon her being less close, Don Alvaro was able to get to her hands a letter in which he begged that she would give to him her love. And he told her in his letter that—if she could not answer it with another letter—she should give him one of two signs by which he would know her will. If she did not love him, she was to hang upon the railing of her balcony a cross of dry palm-leaves—and when he saw that dry cross he would most certainly, he told her, that day die. But if she did love
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