“What would you with me?” asked the prince, motioning his visitor to a seat.

“Prince of —­,” said the stranger, in a voice deep and sweet, but foreign in its accent,—­“son of the most energetic and masculine race that ever applied godlike genius to the service of Human Will, with its winding wickedness and its stubborn grandeur; descendant of the great Visconti in whose chronicles lies the history of Italy in her palmy day, and in whose rise was the development of the mightiest intellect, ripened by the most restless ambition,—­I come to gaze upon the last star in a darkening firmament.  By this hour to-morrow space shall know it not.  Man, unless thy whole nature change, thy days are numbered!”

“What means this jargon?” said the prince, in visible astonishment and secret awe.  “Comest thou to menace me in my own halls, or wouldst thou warn me of a danger?  Art thou some itinerant mountebank, or some unguessed-of friend?  Speak out, and plainly.  What danger threatens me?”

“Zanoni and thy ancestor’s sword,” replied the stranger.

“Ha! ha!” said the prince, laughing scournfully; “I half-suspected thee from the first.  Thou art then the accomplice or the tool of that most dexterous, but, at present, defeated charlatan?  And I suppose thou wilt tell me that if I were to release a certain captive I have made, the danger would vanish, and the hand of the dial would be put back?”

“Judge of me as thou wilt, Prince di —.  I confess my knowledge of Zanoni.  Thou, too, wilt know his power, but not till it consume thee.  I would save, therefore I warn thee.  Dost thou ask me why?  I will tell thee.  Canst thou remember to have heard wild tales of thy grandsire; of his desire for a knowledge that passes that of the schools and cloisters; of a strange man from the East who was his familiar and master in lore against which the Vatican has, from age to age, launched its mimic thunder?  Dost thou call to mind the fortunes of thy ancestor?—­how he succeeded in youth to little but a name; how, after a career wild and dissolute as thine, he disappeared from Milan, a pauper, and a self-exile; how, after years spent, none knew in what climes or in what pursuits, he again revisited the city where his progenitors had reigned; how with him came the wise man of the East, the mystic Mejnour; how they who beheld him, beheld with amaze and fear that time had ploughed no furrow on his brow; that youth seemed fixed, as by a spell, upon his face and form?  Dost thou not know that from that hour his fortunes rose?  Kinsmen the most remote died; estate upon estate fell into the hands of the ruined noble.  He became the guide of princes, the first magnate of Italy.  He founded anew the house of which thou art the last lineal upholder, and transferred his splendour from Milan to the Sicilian realms.  Visions of high ambition were then present with him nightly and daily.  Had he lived, Italy would have known a new dynasty, and the Visconti would have reigned over Magna-Graecia.  He was a man such as the world rarely sees; but his ends, too earthly, were at war with the means he sought.  Had his ambition been more or less, he had been worthy of a realm mightier than the Caesars swayed; worthy of our solemn order; worthy of the fellowship of Mejnour, whom you now behold before you.”