rowing passion for her; a passion enormously stimulated, if not
produced, by that ignorance. She was my oasis of mystery in the dreary
desert of knowledge. I had never allowed my diseased condition to betray
itself, or to drive me into any unusual speech or action, except once,
when, in a moment of peculiar bitterness against my brother, I had
forestalled some words which I knew he was going to utter--a clever
observation, which he had prepared beforehand. He had occasionally a
slightly affected hesitation in his speech, and when he paused an instant
after the second word, my impatience and jealousy impelled me to continue
the speech for him, as if it were something we had both learned by rote.
He coloured and looked astonished, as well as annoyed; and the words had
no sooner escaped my lips than I felt a shock of alarm lest such an
anticipation of words--very far from being words of course, easy to
divine--should have betrayed me as an exceptional being, a sort of quiet
energumen, whom every one, Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid.
But I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could
produce on others; for no one gave any sign of having noticed my
interruption as more than a rudeness, to be forgiven me on the score of
my feeble nervous condition.

While this superadded consciousness of the actual was almost constant
with me, I had never had a recurrence of that distinct prevision which I
have described in relation to my first interview with Bertha; and I was
waiting with eager curiosity to know whether or not my vision of Prague
would prove to have been an instance of the same kind. A few days after
the incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of our frequent visits
to the Lichtenberg Palace. I could never look at many pictures in
succession; for pictures, when they are at all powerful, affect me so
strongly that one or two exhaust all my capability of contemplation. This
morning I had been looking at Giorgione's picture of the cruel-eyed
woman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia. I had stood long alone
before it, fascinated by the terrible reality of that cunning, relentless
face, till I felt a strange poisoned sensation, as if I had long been
inhaling a fatal odour, and was just beginning to be conscious of its
effects. Perhaps even then I should not have moved away, if the rest of
the party had not returned to this room, and announced that they were
going to the Belved