spered to Dorothy, with a little fond
tremor in her voice--

'"She is fast asleep! We will not wake her!"

'Night. I do not believe I have a spark of life left in me. As I came
upstairs I felt, at each step, as if every drop of blood had left my
veins. I am as weak as one at the point of death.

'Courage! courage!--only a few hours more. Manuel will be here to-morrow
morning. We shall leave on Sunday, and on Monday I shall be with my
mother.

'Just now, I returned him two or three books he had lent me. In the
volume of Shelley I underlined with my nail the last two lines of a
certain verse and put a mark in the page--

"And forget me, for I _can never_--
Be thine!"

'_October 9th._--Night. All day long he has sought an opportunity for
speaking to me. His distress is evident. And all day long I have done my
utmost to avoid him, so that he might not sow fresh seeds of pain, of
desire, of regret and remorse in my heart. And I have triumphed--I was
strong and brave--My God, I thank Thee!

'This night is the last. To-morrow we leave--all will be over.

'All will be over? A voice out of the depths cries unto me--I do not
understand its words, but I know that it tells me of coming disaster,
unknown but inevitable, mysterious and inexorable as death. The future
is lugubrious as a cemetery full of open graves, ready to receive the
dead, with here and there a flicker of pale torches which I can scarce
distinguish, and I know not if they are there to lure me on to
destruction or to show me to a path of safety.

'I have re-read my Journal slowly, carefully, from the 15th of
September, the day of my arrival. What a difference between the first
entry and the last!

'I wrote:--I shall wake up in the house of a friend, to the enjoyment of
Francesca's cordial hospitality, in Schifanoja, where the roses are so
fair and the cypresses so tall and grand. I shall wake with the prospect
of some weeks of peace before me--twenty days or more of congenial
intellectual companionship--Alas! where is that promised peace? But the
roses, the beautiful roses, were they, too, faithless to their promise?
Did I perhaps, on that first night in the loggia, open my heart too wide
to their seductive fragrance while Delfina slept? And now the October
moon floods the sky with its cold radiance, and through the closed
windows I see the sharp points of the cypresses, all sombre and
motionless, and on that night they seemed to touch the stars