with its wandering, glittering eyes, appeared to
hang upon the dense leafage that sheltered all the rest of him like a
vizard in whose cavities glowworms had gathered. And more than once, in
passing, Eve delayed a moment, and almost caught that gaze; she was
sensible of his presence there, felt it, as she might have felt an
apparition, as if the eyes were those of a basilisk and she were
fascinated to look and look again, till filled with a strange fear and
unrest. It grew late; by-and-by, before they separated, Eve sang. It
would have been impossible for her to say why she chose a luscious
little Italian air, one that many a time at home, perhaps, Luigi had
heard some midnight lover sing. Through it, as he listened now, he could
fancy the fountain's fall, the rustle of the bough, the half-checked
gurgle of the nightingale, upon the scented waft almost the slow
down-floating of the scattered corolla of the full-blown flower. The
tears sparkled over his face, first of delight, and then of anger.
Something was wanting in the song,--he missed the passionate utterance
of the lover standing by the gate and pouring his soul in his singing.

Suddenly the room was startled by the ring of a voice from the garden, a
voice that outbroke sweet and strong, that snatched the measure from
Eve's lips, flung a fervor into its flow, a depth into its burden, and
carried it on with impetuous fire, lingering with tenderness here, swift
with ardor there, till all hearts bounded in quicker palpitation when
the air again was still. For deep feeling has a potency of its own, and
all that careless group felt as if some deific cloud had passed by.

As for Eve, what coquetry there was in her nature was but the innocent
coruscation of happy spirits, the desire to see her power, the necessity
of being dear to all she touched. Far from pleasant was this vehemence
of devotion; the approach of it oppressed her; she comprehended Luigi as
a creature of another species, another race, than herself; she shrank
before him now with a kind of horror. That night in a nervous excitation
she did not close an eye, and in the morning she was wan as a flower
after rain.

This state of things found at least one observer, a personage of no less
authority in household matters than Paula, the tall and stately woman of
Nubian lineage who had been the nurse of Eve, and who every morning now
stood behind her chair at breakfast, familiarly joining in and gathering
what s