ting my eyes to the distant peril, and my ears to the warning voice
of conscience, with the shuddering temerity of one who, in gathering
violets, ventures too near the edge of a precipice at the foot of which
roars a hungry torrent.

'He shall never know anything from my lips, I shall never know anything
from his. Our two souls will mount together, for a brief space, to the
mountain-tops of the Ideal, will drink side by side at the perennial
fountains, and then each go on its separate way, encouraged and
refreshed.

'How still the air is this afternoon! The sea has the faint milky-blue
tints of the opal, of Murano glass, with here and there a patch like a
mirror dimmed by a breath.

'I am reading Shelley, a favourite poet with him, that divine Ariel
feeding upon light and speaking with the tongues of angels. It is
night----

'_September 25th._--_Mio Dio! Mio Dio!_ His voice when he spoke my
name--the tremor in it--oh, I thought my heart was breaking in my bosom,
and that I must inevitably lose consciousness.--"You will never know,"
he said--"never know how utterly my soul is yours."

'We were in the avenue of the fountains--I was listening to the sound of
the water; but from that moment, I heard nothing more. Everything around
me seemed to flee away, carrying my life with it, and the earth to open
beneath my feet. I made a superhuman effort to control myself. Delfina's
name rose to my lips and I was seized with a wild impulse to fly to her
for protection, for safety. Three times I cried that name, but in the
intervals my heart ceased to beat and the breath died away upon my lips.

'_September 26th._--Was it true? Was it not merely some illusion of my
overwrought and distracted spirit? Why should that hour yesterday seem
to me so far away, so _unreal_?

'He spoke a second time, at greater length, close to my side while I
walked on under the trees as in a dream.--Under the trees was it? It
seemed to me rather that I was walking through the hidden pathways of my
soul, among flowers born of my imagination, listening to the words of an
invisible spirit that yet was part of myself.

'I can still hear the sweet and dreadful words--"I would renounce all
that the future may hold for me to live in a small corner of your
heart--Far from the world, wholly lost in the thought of you--until
death, to all eternity"--And again--"Pity from you would be far dearer
to me than love from any other woman. Your mere presence suffices