sometimes women far above me had cast their eyes down on the arena,
as in Spain ladies do in the bull-ring to pick a lover out thence for
his strength; but I had never cared. I had loved, laughed and wandered
away with the stroller's happy liberty, but I had never cared. Now, all
at once, the whole world seemed dead--dead heaven and earth--and only
one woman's two eyes left living in the universe, living and looking
into my soul and burning it to ashes. Do you know what I mean? No? Ah,
then you know not love.

All the night I lay awake--the short hot night when the western gold of
sunset scarce fades into dark ere the east seems to glow luminous and
transparent with the dawn. Ah! the sunrise! I shall see it once more,
only once more! I shall see it through those bars, a hand's breadth of
it above Tiber, no more; and when again it spreads its rosy warmth over
the sky and reddens the river and the plain, I shall be dead--a headless
thing pushed away under the earth and lime, and over my brain and skull
the wise men will peer with knife and scalpel, and pour the plaster over
its bones to take a cast, and say most likely to one another, as I heard
them say once before a cast in a museum, "A good face, a fair brow, fine
lines: strange that he should have been a murderer!" Well! so be it.
Even though I lived for fourscore years and ten, the sun would nevermore
rise for me as it rose before Phoebus died.

At that time I lived only to see a shadow on the barred windows, a hand
open a lattice, a veiled head glide by through the moonbeams. I was
wretched, yet never had I been so happy. The bolt of the gods stuns as
it falls, but it intoxicates also.

I had been such a fool! such a fool! When she had said so much I had
said nothing: that last moment haunted me with unending pain. If I had
been bolder, if I had only known what to answer, if I had only seized
her in my arms and kissed her! It would have been better to have had
that one moment, and have died for it, than have been turned out of her
presence like a poor cowardly clod.

I cannot tell how the long hot days went on: they were days of drought
to the land, but they were days of paradise to me. The fever-mists were
heavy and the peasants sickened. Tiber was low, and had fetid odors as
its yellow shallows dried up in the sun, clouds of gnats hovered over
the Lagherello and its beds of rushes, and the sullen wind blew always
from the south-east, bringing the desert sand w