The Swan of Vilamorta by Emilia Pardo Bazán

Segundo was the last of the guests to arrive at Las Vides. As he cared but little for games and as Nieves did not take any very active part in them either, they would often have found themselves thrown for society upon each other had it not been for Victorina, who, from the moment Segundo appeared, never left her mother's side, and Elvira Molende who, from the very instant of his arrival, clung to the poet like the ivy to the wall, directing on him a battery of sighs and glances, and treating him to sentimental confidences and rhapsodies sweet enough to surfeit a confectioner's boy. From the moment in which Segundo set foot in Las Vides, Elvira lost all her animation, and assumed a languishing and romantic air, which made her cheeks appear hollower and the circles under her eyes deeper than ever. Her form acquired the melancholy droop of the willow and, giving up sports and pranks, she devoted herself exclusively to the Swan.

As it was moonlight, and the evenings were enjoyable out of doors, as soon as the sun had set, and the labors of the day were ended, and the vintagers assembled for a dance, some of the guests would assemble together also in the garden, generally at the foot of a high wall bordered with leafy camellias, or they would stop and sit down for a chat at some inviting spot on their way home from a walk. Elvira knew by heart a great many verses, both good and bad, generally of a melancholy kind -- sentimental and elegiac; she was familiar with all the flowers of poetry, all the tender verses which constituted the poetic wealth of the locality, and uttered by her thin lips, in the silvery tones of her gentle voice, with the soft accents of her native land, the Galician verses, like an Andalusian moral maxim in the sensual mouth of a gypsy, had a peculiar and impressive beauty -- the sensibility of a race crystallized in a poetic gem, in a tear of love.