hair. Our
heart, too full, overflows; we see the flowery banks of the torrent of
love. Every burning bush we ever knew blazes afresh, and repeats the
heavenly words we once heard and understood. The voice rolls on; it
embraces in its rapid turns those fugitive horizons, and they shrink
away; they vanish, eclipsed by newer and deeper joys--those of an
unrevealed future, to which the fairy points as she returns to the blue
heaven."

"And you," retorted Cataneo, "have you never seen the direct ray of a
star opening the vistas above; have you never mounted on that beam which
guides you to the sky, to the heart of the first causes which move the
worlds?"

To their hearers, the Duke and Capraja were playing a game of which the
premises were unknown.

"Genovese's voice thrills through every fibre," said Capraja.

"And la Tinti's fires the blood," replied the Duke.

"What a paraphrase of happy love is that _cavatina_!" Capraja went on.
"Ah! Rossini was young when he wrote that interpretation of effervescent
ecstasy. My heart filled with renewed blood, a thousand cravings tingled
in my veins. Never have sounds more angelic delivered me more completely
from my earthly bonds! Never did the fairy wave more beautiful arms,
smile more invitingly, lift her tunic more cunningly to display an
ankle, raising the curtain that hides my other life!"

"To-morrow, my old friend," replied Cataneo, "you shall ride on the back
of a dazzling, white swan, who will show you the loveliest land there
is; you shall see the spring-time as children see it. Your heart shall
open to the radiance of a new sun; you shall sleep on crimson silk,
under the gaze of a Madonna; you shall feel like a happy lover gently
kissed by a nymph whose bare feet you still may see, but who is about to
vanish. That swan will be the voice of Genovese, if he can unite it to
its Leda, the voice of Clarina. To-morrow night we are to hear _Mose_,
the grandest opera produced by Italy's greatest genius."

All present left the conversation to the Duke and Capraja, not wishing
to be the victims of mystification. Only Vendramin and the French doctor
listened to them for a few minutes. The opium-smoker understood these
poetic flights; he had the key of the palace where those two sensuous
imaginations were wandering. The doctor, too, tried to understand, and
he understood, for he was one of the Pleiades of genius belonging to the
Paris school of medicine, from which a true physi