‘He shall be my brother,’ returned the Greek.

‘How calmly,’ said Ione, rousing herself from the gloom into which her thoughts of Apaecides had plunged her—­’how calmly the clouds seem to repose in heaven; and yet you tell me, for I knew it not myself, that the earth shook beneath us last night.’

’It did, and more violently, they say, than it has done since the great convulsion sixteen years ago:  the land we live in yet nurses mysterious terror; and the reign of Pluto, which spreads beneath our burning fields, seems rent with unseen commotion.  Didst thou not feel the earth quake, Nydia, where thou wert seated last night? and was it not the fear that it occasioned thee that made thee weep?’

’I felt the soil creep and heave beneath me, like some monstrous serpent,’ answered Nydia; ’but as I saw nothing, I did not fear:  I imagined the convulsion to be a spell of the Egyptian’s.  They say he has power over the elements.’

‘Thou art a Thessalian, my Nydia,’ replied Glaucus, ’and hast a national right to believe in magic.

‘Magic!—­who doubts it?’ answered Nydia, simply:  ‘dost thou?’

’Until last night (when a necromantic prodigy did indeed appal me), methinks I was not credulous in any other magic save that of love!’ said Glaucus, in a tremulous voice, and fixing his eyes on Ione.

‘Ah!’ said Nydia, with a sort of shiver, and she awoke mechanically a few pleasing notes from her lyre; the sound suited well the tranquility of the waters, and the sunny stillness of the noon.

’Play to us, dear Nydia, said Glaucus—­’play and give us one of thine old Thessalian songs:  whether it be of magic or not, as thou wilt—­let it, at least, be of love!’

‘Of love!’ repeated Nydia, raising her large, wandering eyes, that ever thrilled those who saw them with a mingled fear and pity; you could never familiarize yourself to their aspect:  so strange did it seem that those dark wild orbs were ignorant of the day, and either so fixed was their deep mysterious gaze, or so restless and perturbed their glance, that you felt, when you encountered them, that same vague, and chilling, and half-preternatural impression, which comes over you in the presence of the insane—­of those who, having a life outwardly like your own, have a life within life—­dissimilar—­unsearchable—­unguessed!

‘Will you that I should sing of love?’ said she, fixing those eyes upon Glaucus.

‘Yes,’ replied he, looking down.

She moved a little way from the arm of Ione, still cast round her, as if that soft embrace embarrassed; and placing her light and graceful instrument on her knee, after a short prelude, she sang the following strain: 

Nydia’s love-song

I

The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose,
And the Rose loved one;
For who recks the wind where it blows? 
Or loves not the sun?

II