The monk retired, and Irene resumed her watch.

The sleep of Adrian was at first broken and interrupted—­his features, his exclamations, his gestures, all evinced great agony, whether mental or bodily:  it seemed, as perhaps it was, a fierce and doubtful struggle between life and death for the conquest of the sleeper.  Patient, silent, breathing but by long-drawn gasps, Irene sate at the bed-head.  The lamp was removed to the further end of the chamber, and its ray, shaded by the draperies, did not suffice to give to her gaze more than the outline of the countenance she watched.  In that awful suspense, all the thoughts that hitherto had stirred her mind lay hushed and mute.  She was only sensible to that unutterable fear which few of us have been happy enough not to know.  That crushing weight under which we can scarcely breathe or move, the avalanche over us, freezing and suspended, which we cannot escape from, beneath which, every moment, we may be buried and overwhelmed.  The whole destiny of life was in the chances of that single night!  It was just as Adrian at last seemed to glide into a deeper and serener slumber, that the bells of the death-cart broke with their boding knell the palpable silence of the streets.  Now hushed, now revived, as the cart stopped for its gloomy passengers, and coming nearer and nearer after every pause.  At length she heard the heavy wheels stop under the very casement, and a voice deep and muffled calling aloud, “Bring out the dead!” She rose, and with a noiseless step, passed to secure the door, when the dull lamp gleamed upon the dark and shrouded forms of the Becchini.

“You have not marked the door, nor set out the body,” said one gruffly; “but this is the third night!  He is ready for us.”

“Hush, he sleeps—­away, quick, it is not the Plague that seized him.”

“Not the Plague?” growled the Becchino in a disappointed tone; “I thought no other illness dared encroach upon the rights of the gavocciolo!”

“Go—­here’s money; leave us.”

And the grisly carrier sullenly withdrew.  The cart moved on, the bell renewed its summons, till slowly and faintly the dreadful larum died in the distance.

Shading the lamp with her hand, Irene stole to the bed side, fearful that the sound and the intrusion had disturbed the slumberer.  But his face was still locked, as in a vice, with that iron sleep.  He stirred not—­the breath scarcely passed his lips—­she felt his pulse, as the wan hand lay on the coverlid—­there was a slight beat—­she was contented—­removed the light, and, retiring to a corner of the room, placed the little cross suspended round her neck upon the table, and prayed, in her intense suffering, to Him who had known death, and who—­Son of Heaven though he was, and Sovereign of the Seraphim—­had also prayed, in his earthly travail, that the cup might pass away.