In the fiercest heat of the day, and on foot, Adrian returned to Florence.  As he approached the city, all that festive and gallant scene he had quitted seemed to him like a dream; a vision of the gardens and bowers of an enchantress, from which he woke abruptly as a criminal may wake on the morning of his doom to see the scaffold and the deathsman;—­so much did each silent and lonely step into the funeral city bring back his bewildered thoughts at once to life and to death.  The parting words of Mariana sounded like a knell at his heart.  And now as he passed on—­the heat of the day, the lurid atmosphere, long fatigue, alternate exhaustion and excitement, combining with the sickness of disappointment, the fretting consciousness of precious moments irretrievably lost, and his utter despair of forming any systematic mode of search—­fever began rapidly to burn through his veins.  His temples felt oppressed as with the weight of a mountain; his lips parched with intolerable thirst; his strength seemed suddenly to desert him; and it was with pain and labour that he dragged one languid limb after the other.

“I feel it,” thought he, with the loathing nausea and shivering dread with which nature struggles ever against death; “I feel it upon me—­the Devouring and the Viewless—­I shall perish, and without saving her; nor shall even one grave contain 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!”