d presently a sort of trance came
over him: he imagined that he was returned to the home of his infancy;
that he was in the small chamber where, over his early slumbers,
his mother had watched and prayed. There it was,--visible, palpable,
solitary, unaltered. In the recess, the homely bed; on the walls, the
shelves filled with holy books; the very easel on which he had first
sought to call the ideal to the canvas, dust-covered, broken, in the
corner. Below the window lay the old churchyard: he saw it green in the
distance, the sun glancing through the yew-trees; he saw the tomb where
father and mother lay united, and the spire pointing up to heaven, the
symbol of the hopes of those who consigned the ashes to the dust; in
his ear rang the bells, pealing, as on a Sabbath day. Far fled all
the visions of anxiety and awe that had haunted and convulsed; youth,
boyhood, childhood came back to him with innocent desires and hopes; he
thought he fell upon his knees to pray. He woke,--he woke in
delicious tears, he felt that the Phantom was fled forever. He looked
round,--Zanoni was gone. On the table lay these lines, the ink yet
wet:--

"I will find ways and means for thy escape. At nightfall, as the clock
strikes nine, a boat shall wait thee on the river before this house;
the boatman will guide thee to a retreat where thou mayst rest in safety
till the Reign of Terror, which nears its close, be past. Think no more
of the sensual love that lured, and wellnigh lost thee. It betrayed, and
would have destroyed. Thou wilt regain thy land in safety,--long years
yet spared to thee to muse over the past, and to redeem it. For thy
future, be thy dream thy guide, and thy tears thy baptism."

The Englishman obeyed the injunctions of the letter, and found their
truth.

CHAPTER 7.X.

Quid mirare meas tot in uno corpore formas?
Propert.

(Why wonder that I have so many forms in a single body?)

Zanoni to Mejnour.

.....

"She is in one of their prisons,--their inexorable prisons. It is
Robespierre's order,--I have tracked the cause to Glyndon. This, then,
made that terrible connection between their fates which I could not
unravel, but which (till severed as it now is) wrapped Glyndon himself
in the same cloud that concealed her. In prison,--in prison!--it is the
gate of the grave! Her trial, and the inevitable execution that follows
such trial, is the third day from this. The tyrant has fixed all his
schemes o