“Signor, I love you,” she said.

Then we were silent as before, but she stood no longer alone and opposite.  One passionate step, an outstretched arm, and her head on my bosom, my lips bent to hers.

All the nightingales burst forth in choral redundance of song, all the low winds woke and fainted again through the balmy boughs, all the great stars bent out of heaven to shed their sweet influences upon us.

It seemed to me that in that old palace-garden life began, my memory went out in confused joy.  I held her, she was mine! mine, mine, in life and for eternity!  Fool! it was I who was hers!  Man, you are a priest, and must not love.  I, too, was sworn a priest to my country.  So we break oaths!

O moments of swift bliss, why are you torture to remember?  Let me not think how the night slipped into dawn as we roamed, how pale gold filtered through the darkness and bleached the air, how bird after bird with distant chirrup and breaking time announced the day.  She left me, and as well it might be night.  I wound a strange way home.  I questioned if it were the dream of a fevered brain; I wondered, would she remember when next she saw me?  None met with me that day; I forgot all.  With the night I again waited in the garden.  In vain I waited; she came no more.  I waxed full of love’s anger, I crushed the tendril and the vine, I wandered up and down the walks and cursed these thorns that tore my heart.  As I went, an angle of the shrubbery allured; I turned, and lo! full radiance from open doors, and silvery sounds of sport.  I leaned against the ilex, lost in shadow, and watched her as she stirred and floated there before me in the light.  She seemed to carry with her an atmosphere of warmth and brilliance; all things were ordered as she moved; one throng melted before her, another followed.  By-and-by she stood at the long casement to seek acquaintance with the night.  Constantly I thought to meet her eye, and I would not reflect that she saw only dusk and vacancy.  Then indignantly I stepped from the ilex and confronted her.  A low, glad cry escapes her lips, she holds her arms toward me and would cross the sill, when a voice constrains her from within.  It is he, the accursed Neapolitan.

“Signor,” she says, “a vampire flitted past the dawn.”

Dawn indeed was breaking.  The man still stood there when she left him, and still looked out; his eyes lay on me, and irate and motionless I returned their gaze.  One by one her guests departed; with a last threatening glance, he, too, withdrew.  I plunged into the silent places again, and waited now, assured that she would come.  The constellations paled, and still I was alone.  Then I wandered restlessly again, and, winding through thickets of leaf-distilled perfume, I came where just above a balcony, and almost beyond reach from it, a light burned dimly in one narrow window.  I did not ask myself why I did it, but in another moment I had clambered to the place, and, standing there, I bent forward to my right, pulled away the tangle of ivy that filled half the niche, and was peering in.