One day, a little before sunset, Pisani woke partially recovered from the delirium which had preyed upon him, with few intervals, since the second day of the disease; and casting about him his dizzy and feeble eyes, he recognised Viola, and smiled.  He faltered her name as he rose and stretched his arms.  She fell upon his breast, and strove to suppress her tears.

“Thy mother?” he said.  “Does she sleep?”

“She sleeps,—­ah, yes!” and the tears gushed forth.

“I thought—­eh!  I know not what I have thought.  But do not weep:  I shall be well now,—­quite well.  She will come to me when she wakes,—­will she?”

Viola could not speak; but she busied herself in pouring forth an anodyne, which she had been directed to give the sufferer as soon as the delirium should cease.  The doctor had told her, too, to send for him the instant so important a change should occur.

She went to the door and called to the woman who, during Gionetta’s pretended illness, had been induced to supply her place; but the hireling answered not.  She flew through the chambers to search for her in vain,—­the hireling had caught Gionetta’s fears, and vanished.  What was to be done?  The case was urgent,—­the doctor had declared not a moment should be lost in obtaining his attendance; she must leave her father,—­she must go herself!  She crept back into the room,—­the anodyne seemed already to have taken benign effect; the patient’s eyes were closed, and he breathed regularly, as in sleep.  She stole away, threw her veil over her face, and hurried from the house.

Now the anodyne had not produced the effect which it appeared to have done; instead of healthful sleep, it had brought on a kind of light-headed somnolence, in which the mind, preternaturally restless, wandered about its accustomed haunts, waking up its old familiar instincts and inclinations.  It was not sleep,—­it was not delirium; it was the dream-wakefulness which opium sometimes induces, when every nerve grows tremulously alive, and creates a corresponding activity in the frame, to which it gives a false and hectic vigour.  Pisani missed something,—­what, he scarcely knew; it was a combination of the two wants most essential to his mental life,—­the voice of his wife, the touch of his Familiar.  He rose,—­he left his bed, he leisurely put on his old dressing-robe, in which he had been wont to compose.  He smiled complacently as the associations connected with the garment came over his memory; he walked tremulously across the room, and entered the small cabinet next to his chamber, in which his wife had been accustomed more often to watch than sleep, when illness separated her from his side.  The room was desolate and void.  He looked round wistfully, and muttered to himself, and then proceeded regularly, and with a noiseless step, through the chambers of the silent house, one by one.

He came at last to that in which old Gionetta—­faithful to her own safety, if nothing else—­nursed herself, in the remotest corner of the house, from the danger of infection.  As he glided in,—­wan, emaciated, with an uneasy, anxious, searching look in his haggard eyes,—­the old woman shrieked aloud, and fell at his feet.  He bent over her, passed his thin hands along her averted face, shook his head, and said in a hollow voice,—­