us!"

But these thoughts served rapidly to augment the disease which began to
prey upon him; and ere he reached the interior of the city, even thought
itself forsook him. The images of men and houses grew indistinct and
shadowy before his eyes; the burning pavement became unsteady and
reeling beneath his feet; delirium gathered over him, and he went on his
way muttering broken and incoherent words; the few who met fled from
him in dismay. Even the monks, still continuing their solemn and sad
processions, passed with a murmured bene vobis to the other side from
that on which his steps swerved and faltered. And from a booth at the
corner of a street, four Becchini, drinking together, fixed upon him
from their black masks the gaze that vultures fix upon some dying
wanderer of the desert. Still he crept on, stretching out his arms like
a man in the dark, and seeking with the vague sense that yet struggled
against the gathering delirium, to find out the mansion in which he
had fixed his home; though many as fair to live, and as meet to die in,
stood with open portals before and beside his path.

"Irene, Irene!" he cried, sometimes in a muttered and low tone,
sometimes in a wild and piercing shriek, "where art thou? Where? I come
to snatch thee from them; they shall not have thee, the foul and ugly
fiends! Pah! how the air smells of dead flesh! Irene, Irene! we will
away to mine own palace and the heavenly lake--Irene!"

While thus benighted, and thus exclaiming, two females suddenly emerged
from a neighbouring house, masked and mantled.

"Vain wisdom!" said the taller and slighter of the two, whose mantle, it
is here necessary to observe, was of a deep blue, richly broidered with
silver, of a shape and a colour not common in Florence, but usual in
Rome, where the dress of ladies of the higher rank was singularly bright
in hue and ample in fold--thus differing from the simpler and more
slender draperies of the Tuscan fashion--"Vain wisdom, to fly a
relentless and certain doom!"

"Why, thou wouldst not have us hold the same home with three of the
dead in the next chamber--strangers too to us--when Florence has so many
empty halls? Trust me, we shall not walk far ere we suit ourselves with
a safer lodgment."

"Hitherto, indeed, we have been miraculously preserved," sighed the
other, whose voice and shape were those of extreme youth; "yet would
that we knew where to fly--what mount, what wood, what cavern, held my
brother