at, until the ordeal was past, there
could be no equality between thy wisdom and her love? Art thou absent
now seeking amidst thy solemn secrets the solemn safeguards for child
and mother, and forgettest thou that the phantom that served thee hath
power over its own gifts,--over the lives it taught thee to rescue from
the grave? Dost thou not know that Fear and Distrust, once sown in the
heart of Love, spring up from the seed into a forest that excludes the
stars? Dark, bright one! the hateful eyes glare beside the mother and
the child!

All that day Viola was distracted by a thousand thoughts and terrors,
which fled as she examined them to settle back the darklier. She
remembered that, as she had once said to Glyndon, her very childhood had
been haunted with strange forebodings, that she was ordained for some
preternatural doom. She remembered that, as she had told him this,
sitting by the seas that slumbered in the arms of the Bay of Naples, he,
too, had acknowledged the same forebodings, and a mysterious sympathy
had appeared to unite their fates. She remembered, above all, that,
comparing their entangled thoughts, both had then said, that with the
first sight of Zanoni the foreboding, the instinct, had spoken to their
hearts more audibly than before, whispering that "with HIM was connected
the secret of the unconjectured life."

And now, when Glyndon and Viola met again, the haunting fears of
childhood, thus referred to, woke from their enchanted sleep. With
Glyndon's terror she felt a sympathy, against which her reason and her
love struggled in vain. And still, when she turned her looks upon her
child, it watched her with that steady, earnest eye, and its lips moved
as if it sought to speak to her,--but no sound came. The infant refused
to sleep. Whenever she gazed upon its face, still those wakeful,
watchful eyes!--and in their earnestness, there spoke something of pain,
of upbraiding, of accusation. They chilled her as she looked. Unable
to endure, of herself, this sudden and complete revulsion of all the
feelings which had hitherto made up her life, she formed the resolution
natural to her land and creed; she sent for the priest who had
habitually attended her at Venice, and to him she confessed, with
passionate sobs and intense terror, the doubts that had broken upon her.
The good father, a worthy and pious man, but with little education and
less sense, one who held (as many of the lower Italians do to this da