nt
himself with my thanks."

She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then, as if inwardly
ashamed at having stepped aside from her maidenly reserve to respond to
a stranger's greeting, passed swiftly homeward through the garden. But
few as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni, when she was on the
point of vanishing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful
bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle
thought; there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower
from a fresh one at so great a distance.

For many days after this incident the young man avoided the window that
looked into Dr. Rappaccini's garden, as if something ugly and monstrous
would have blasted his eyesight had he been betrayed into a glance. He
felt conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the
influence of an unintelligible power by the communication which he had
opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if his heart
were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself at once;
the next wiser, to have accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the
familiar and daylight view of Beatrice--thus bringing her rigidly and
systematically within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all,
while avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni to have remained so near this
extraordinary being that the proximity and possibility even of
intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild
vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing.
Guasconti had not a deep heart--or, at all events, its depths were not
sounded now; but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent southern
temperament, which rose every instant to a higher fever pitch. Whether
or no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath,
the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were
indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a
fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not love, although her
rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her
spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to
pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and
horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered
like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less did he know
what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his
breast, alternately vanquishing o