“Quick, Lucia!” cried she, breathlessly, turning to her handmaid:  “quick! the rope-ladder! it is he! he is come!  How slow you are! haste, girl,—­he may be discovered!  There,—­O joy,—­O joy!—­My lover! my hero! my Rienzi!”

“It is you!” said Rienzi, as, now entering the chamber, he wound his arms around her half-averted form, “and what is night to others is day to me!”

The first sweet moments of welcome were over; and Rienzi was seated at the feet of his mistress:  his head rested on her knees—­his face looking up to hers—­their hands clasped each in each.

“And for me thou bravest these dangers!” said the lover; “the shame of discovery, the wrath of thy parents!”

“But what are my perils to thine?  Oh, Heaven! if my father found thee here thou wouldst die!”

“He would think it then so great a humiliation, that thou, beautiful Nina, who mightst match with the haughtiest names of Rome, shouldst waste thy love on a plebeian—­even though the grandson of an emperor!”

The proud heart of Nina could sympathize well with the wounded pride of her lover:  she detected the soreness which lurked beneath his answer, carelessly as it was uttered.

“Hast thou not told me,” she said, “of that great Marius, who was no noble, but from whom the loftiest Colonna would rejoice to claim his descent? and do I not know in thee one who shall yet eclipse the power of Marius, unsullied by his vices?”

“Delicious flattery! sweet prophet!” said Rienzi, with a melancholy smile; “never were thy supporting promises of the future more welcome to me than now; for to thee I will say what I would utter to none else—­my soul half sinks beneath the mighty burthen I have heaped upon it.  I want new courage as the dread hour approaches; and from thy words and looks I drink it.”

“Oh!” answered Nina, blushing as she spoke, “glorious is indeed the lot which I have bought by my love for thee:  glorious to share thy schemes, to cheer thee in doubt, to whisper hope to thee in danger.”

“And give grace to me in triumph!” added Rienzi, passionately.  “Ah! should the future ever place upon these brows the laurel-wreath due to one who has saved his country, what joy, what recompence, to lay it at thy feet!  Perhaps, in those long and solitary hours of languor and exhaustion which fill up the interstices of time,—­the dull space for sober thought between the epochs of exciting action,—­perhaps I should have failed and flagged, and renounced even my dreams for Rome, had they not been linked also with my dreams for thee!—­had I not pictured to myself the hour when my fate should elevate me beyond my birth; when thy sire would deem it no disgrace to give thee to my arms; when thou, too, shouldst stand amidst the dames of Rome, more honoured, as more beautiful, than all; and when I should see that pomp, which my own soul disdains, (’Quem semper abhorrui sicut cenum’ is the expression used by Rienzi, in his letter to his