With my brain full of hot whirling thoughts like these I looked through the carved heraldic work of the villa gates.  Here had Guido stood, poor wretch, last night, shaking these twisted wreaths of iron in impotent fury.  There on the mosaic pavement he had flung the trembling old servant who had told him of the absence of his traitress.  On this very spot he had launched his curse, which, though he knew it not, was the curse of a dying man.  I was glad he had uttered it—­such maledictions cling!  There was nothing but compassion for him in my heart now that he was dead.  He had been duped and wronged even as I; and I felt that his spirit, released from its grosser clay, would work with mine and aid in her punishment.

I paced round the silent house till I came to the private wicket that led into the avenue; I opened it and entered the familiar path.  I had not been there since the fatal night on which I had learned my own betrayal.  How intensely still were those solemn pines—­how gaunt and dark and grim!  Not a branch quivered—­not a leaf stirred.  A cold dew that was scarcely a frost glittered on the moss at my feet, No bird’s voice broke the impressive hush of the wood-lands morning dream.  No bright-hued flower unbuttoned its fairy cloak to the breeze; yet there was a subtle perfume everywhere—­the fragrance of unseen violets whose purple eyes were still closed in slumber.

I gazed on the scene as a man may behold in a vision the spot where he once was happy.  I walked a few paces, then paused with a strange beating at my heart.  A shadow fell across my path—­it flitted before me, it stopped—­it lay still.  I saw it resolve itself into the figure of a man stretched out in rigid silence, with the light beating full on its smiling, dead face, and also on a deep wound just above his heart, from which the blood oozed redly, staining the grass on which he lay.  Mastering the sick horror which seized me at this sight, I sprung forward—­the shadow vanished instantly—­it was a mere optical delusion, the result of my overwrought and excited condition.  I shuddered involuntarily at the image my own heated fancy had conjured up; should I always see Guido thus, I thought, even in my dreams?

Suddenly a ringing, swaying rush of sound burst joyously on the silence—­the slumbering trees awoke, their leaves moved, their dark branches quivered, and the grasses lifted up their green lilliputian sword-blades.  Bells!—­and such bells!—­tongues of melody that stormed the air with sweetest eloquence—­round, rainbow bubbles of music that burst upon the wind, and dispersed in delicate broken echoes.