all we not grow old together, and our eyes
be accustomed to a change which the heart shall not share!"

Zanoni sighed. He turned away, and seemed to commune with himself.

Glyndon's attention grew yet more earnest.

"But were it so," muttered Zanoni; and then looking steadfastly at
Viola, he said, with a half-smile, "Hast thou no curiosity to learn more
of the lover thou once couldst believe the agent of the Evil One?"

"None; all that one wishes to know of the beloved one, I know--THAT THOU
LOVEST ME!"

"I have told thee that my life is apart from others. Wouldst thou not
seek to share it?"

"I share it now!"

"But were it possible to be thus young and fair forever, till the world
blazes round us as one funeral pyre!"

"We shall be so, when we leave the world!"

Zanoni was mute for some moments, and at length he said,--

"Canst thou recall those brilliant and aerial dreams which once visited
thee, when thou didst fancy that thou wert preordained to some fate
aloof and afar from the common children of the earth?"

"Zanoni, the fate is found."

"And hast thou no terror of the future?"

"The future! I forget it! Time past and present and to come reposes
in thy smile. Ah, Zanoni, play not with the foolish credulities of my
youth! I have been better and humbler since thy presence has dispelled
the mist of the air. The future!--well, when I have cause to dread it, I
will look up to heaven, and remember who guides our fate!"

As she lifted her eyes above, a dark cloud swept suddenly over the
scene. It wrapped the orange-trees, the azure ocean, the dense sands;
but still the last images that it veiled from the charmed eyes of
Glyndon were the forms of Viola and Zanoni. The face of the one rapt,
serene, and radiant; the face of the other, dark, thoughtful, and locked
in more than its usual rigidness of melancholy beauty and profound
repose.

"Rouse thyself," said Mejnour; "thy ordeal has commenced! There are
pretenders to the solemn science who could have shown thee the
absent, and prated to thee, in their charlatanic jargon, of the secret
electricities and the magnetic fluid of whose true properties they know
but the germs and elements. I will lend thee the books of those glorious
dupes, and thou wilt find, in the dark ages, how many erring steps have
stumbled upon the threshold of the mighty learning, and fancied they
had pierced the temple. Hermes and Albert and Paracelsus, I knew ye all;
but, noble as ye