with its expression: it was anxious, abstracted, perturbed. "This
stillness awes me," she whispered.

Zanoni did not seem to hear her. He muttered to himself, and his eyes
gazed round restlessly. She knew not why, but that gaze, which seemed
to pierce into space,--that muttered voice in some foreign
language--revived dimly her earlier superstitions. She was more fearful
since the hour when she knew that she was to be a mother. Strange crisis
in the life of woman, and in her love! Something yet unborn begins
already to divide her heart with that which had been before its only
monarch.

"Look on me, Zanoni," she said, pressing his hand.

He turned: "Thou art pale, Viola; thy hand trembles!"

"It is true. I feel as if some enemy were creeping near us."

"And the instinct deceives thee not. An enemy is indeed at hand. I see
it through the heavy air; I hear it through the silence: the Ghostly
One,--the Destroyer, the PESTILENCE! Ah, seest thou how the leaves swarm
with insects, only by an effort visible to the eye. They follow the
breath of the plague!" As he spoke, a bird fell from the boughs at
Viola's feet; it fluttered, it writhed an instant, and was dead.

"Oh, Viola!" cried Zanoni, passionately, "that is death. Dost thou not
fear to die?"

"To leave thee? Ah, yes!"

"And if I could teach thee how Death may be defied; if I could arrest
for thy youth the course of time; if I could--"

He paused abruptly, for Viola's eyes spoke only terror; her cheek and
lips were pale.

"Speak not thus,--look not thus," she said, recoiling from him. "You
dismay me. Ah, speak not thus, or I should tremble,--no, not for myself,
but for thy child."

"Thy child! But wouldst thou reject for thy child the same glorious
boon?"

"Zanoni!"

"Well!"

"The sun has sunk from our eyes, but to rise on those of others. To
disappear from this world is to live in the world afar. Oh, lover,--oh,
husband!" she continued, with sudden energy, "tell me that thou didst
but jest,--that thou didst but trifle with my folly! There is less
terror in the pestilence than in thy words."

Zanoni's brow darkened; he looked at her in silence for some moments,
and then said, almost severely,--

"What hast thou known of me to distrust?"

"Oh, pardon, pardon!--nothing!" cried Viola, throwing herself on his
breast, and bursting into tears. "I will not believe even thine own
words, if they seem to wrong thee!" He kissed the tears from her eyes,
but m