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,--

"I cannot find them; where are they?"

"Who, dear master? Oh, have compassion on yourself; they are not here.
Blessed saints! this is terrible; he has touched me; I am dead!"

"Dead! who is dead? Is any one dead?"

"Ah! don't talk so; you must know it well: my poor mistress,--she caught
the fever from you; it is infectious enough to kill a whole city. San
Gennaro protect me! My poor mistress, she is dead,--buried, too; and
I, your faithful Gionetta, woe is me! Go, go--to--to bed again, dearest
master,--go!"

The poor musician stood for one moment mute and unmoving, then a slight
shiver ran through his frame; he turned and glided back, silent and
spectre-like, as he had entered. He came into the room where he had been
accustomed to compose,--where his wife, in her sweet patience, had so
ofte