t its dimpled hands as if to clasp the dancing motes that
revelled in the beam. The mother turned her eyes from the glory; it
saddened her yet more. She turned and sighed.

Is this the same Viola who bloomed fairer than their own Idalia under
the skies of Greece? How changed! How pale and worn! She sat listlessly,
her arms dropping on her knee; the smile that was habitual to her lips
was gone. A heavy, dull despondency, as if the life of life were no
more, seemed to weigh down her youth, and make it weary of that happy
sun! In truth, her existence had languished away since it had wandered,
as some melancholy stream, from the source that fed it. The sudden
enthusiasm of fear or superstition that had almost, as if still in the
unconscious movements of a dream, led her to fly from Zanoni, had ceased
from the day which dawned upon her in a foreign land. Then--there--she
felt that in the smile she had evermore abandoned lived her life. She
did not repent,--she would not have recalled the impulse that winged her
flight. Though the enthusiasm was gone, the superstition yet remained;
she still believed she had saved her child from that dark and guilty
sorcery, concerning which the traditions of all lands are prodigal, but
in none do they find such credulity, or excite such dread, as in
the South of Italy. This impression was confirmed by the mysterious
conversations of Glyndon, and by her own perception of the fearful
change that had passed over one who represented himself as the victim
of the enchanters. She did not, therefore, repent; but her very volition
seemed gone.

On their arrival at Paris, Viola saw her companion--the faithful
wife--no more. Ere three weeks were passed, husband and wife had ceased
to live.

And now, for the first time, the drudgeries of this hard earth claimed
the beautiful Neapolitan. In that profession, giving voice and shape to
poetry and song, in which her first years were passed, there is, while
it lasts, an excitement in the art that lifts it from the labour of a
calling. Hovering between two lives, the Real and Ideal, dwells the life
of music and the stage. But that life was lost evermore to the idol of
the eyes and ears of Naples. Lifted to the higher realm of passionate
love, it seemed as if the fictitious genius which represents the
thoughts of others was merged in the genius that grows all thought
itself. It had been the worst infidelity to the Lost, to have descended
again to live on the