“What do you tend to?”

“This:  that you have faculties that may attain to surpassing power, that may rank you among those enchanters who, greater than the magian, leave behind them an enduring influence, worshipped wherever beauty is comprehended, wherever the soul is sensible of a higher world than that in which matter struggles for crude and incomplete existence.

“But to make available those faculties, need I be a prophet to tell you that you must learn to concentre upon great objects all your desires?  The heart must rest, that the mind may be active.  At present you wander from aim to aim.  As the ballast to the ship, so to the spirit are faith and love.  With your whole heart, affections, humanity, centred in one object, your mind and aspirations will become equally steadfast and in earnest.  Viola is a child as yet; you do not perceive the high nature the trials of life will develop.  Pardon me, if I say that her soul, purer and loftier than your own, will bear it upward, as a secret hymn carries aloft the spirits of the world.  Your nature wants the harmony, the music which, as the Pythagoreans wisely taught, at once elevates and soothes.  I offer you that music in her love.”

“But am I sure that she does love me?”

“Artist, no; she loves you not at present; her affections are full of another.  But if I could transfer to you, as the loadstone transfers its attraction to the magnet, the love that she has now for me,—­if I could cause her to see in you the ideal of her dreams—­”

“Is such a gift in the power of man?”

“I offer it to you, if your love be lawful, if your faith in virtue and yourself be deep and loyal; if not, think you that I would disenchant her with truth to make her adore a falsehood?”

“But if,” persisted Glyndon,—­“if she be all that you tell me, and if she love you, how can you rob yourself of so priceless a treasure?”

“Oh, shallow and mean heart of man!” exclaimed Zanoni, with unaccustomed passion and vehemence, “dost thou conceive so little of love as not to know that it sacrifices all—­love itself—­for the happiness of the thing it loves?  Hear me!” And Zanoni’s face grew pale.  “Hear me!  I press this upon you, because I love her, and because I fear that with me her fate will be less fair than with yourself.  Why,—­ask not, for I will not tell you.  Enough!  Time presses now for your answer; it cannot long be delayed.  Before the night of the third day from this, all choice will be forbid you!”

“But,” said Glyndon, still doubting and suspicious,—­“but why this haste?”

“Man, you are not worthy of her when you ask me.  All I can tell you here, you should have known yourself.  This ravisher, this man of will, this son of the old Visconti, unlike you,—­steadfast, resolute, earnest even in his crimes,—­never relinquishes an object.  But one passion controls his lust,—­it is his avarice.  The day after his attempt on Viola, his uncle, the Cardinal