Page:The Coming Race, etc - 1888.djvu/307

Rh "O! Signer Zicci is very rich and very generous; but he wants to be your cavalier, not your husband. I see that—leave me alone. When you are married, then you will see how amiable Signor Zicci will be. Oh, per fede, but he will be as close to your husband as the yolk to the white—that he will."

"Silence, Gionetta! How wretched I am to have no one else to speak to—to advise me. Oh, beautiful sun!" and the girl pressed her hand to her heart with wild energy, "why do you light every spot but this? Dark—dark. And a little while ago I was so calm, so innocent, so gay. I did not hate you, then, Gionetta, hateful as your talk was I hate you now. Go in—leave me alone—leave me."

"And indeed it is time I should leave you, for the polenta will be spoiled, and you have eat nothing all day. If you don't eat you will lose your beauty, my darling, and then nobody will care for you. Nobody cares for us when we grow ugly—I know that and then you must, like old Gionetta, get some Isabel of your own to spoil. I'll go and see to the polenta."

"Since I have known this man," said the actress, half aloud, "since his dark eyes have fascinated me, I am no longer the same. I long to escape from myself—to glide with the sunbeam over the hill-tops—to become something that is not of earth. Is it, indeed, that he is a sorcerer, as I have heard? Phantoms float before me at night, and a fluttering like the wing of a bird within my heart, seems as if the spirit were terrified, and would break its cage."

While murmuring these incoherent rhapsodies, a step that she did not hear approached the actress, and a light hand touched her arm.

"Isabella! 'carissima! Isabella!"

She turned and saw Glyndon. The sight of his fair young face calmed her at once. She did not love him, yet his sight gave her pleasure. She had for him a kind and grateful feeling. Ah, if she had never beheld Zicci!

"Isabel," said the Englishman, drawing her again to the bench from which she had risen, and seating himself beside her. "You know how passionately I love thee. Hitherto thou hast played with my impatience and my ardour; thou hast sometimes smiled, sometimes frowned away my importunities for a reply to my suit; but this day I know not how it is I feel a more sustained and settled courage to address thee, and learn the happiest or the worst. I have rivals, I know, rivals who are more powerful than the poor artist. Are they also more favoured?"

Isabel blushed faintly, but her countenance was grave and