s--their hearts are exhausted. So, ever chasing love, and taught
by a restless imagination to exaggerate, perhaps, its charms, the
Egyptian had spent all the glory of his years without attaining the
object of his desires. The beauty of to-morrow succeeded the beauty of
to-day, and the shadows bewildered him in his pursuit of the substance.
When, two years before the present date, he beheld Ione, he saw, for the
first time, one whom he imagined he could love. He stood, then, upon
that bridge of life, from which man sees before him distinctly a wasted
youth on the one side, and the darkness of approaching age upon the
other: a time in which we are more than ever anxious, perhaps, to secure
to ourselves, ere it be yet too late, whatever we have been taught to
consider necessary to the enjoyment of a life of which the brighter half
is gone.

With an earnestness and a patience which he had never before commanded
for his pleasures, Arbaces had devoted himself to win the heart of Ione.
It did not content him to love, he desired to be loved. In this hope he
had watched the expanding youth of the beautiful Neapolitan; and,
knowing the influence that the mind possesses over those who are taught
to cultivate the mind, he had contributed willingly to form the genius
and enlighten the intellect of Ione, in the hope that she would be thus
able to appreciate what he felt would be his best claim to her
affection: viz, a character which, however criminal and perverted, was
rich in its original elements of strength and grandeur. When he felt
that character to be acknowledged, he willingly allowed, nay, encouraged
her, to mix among the idle votaries of pleasure, in the belief that her
soul, fitted for higher commune, would miss the companionship of his
own, and that, in comparison with others, she would learn to love
herself. He had forgot, that as the sunflower to the sun, so youth
turns to youth, until his jealousy of Glaucus suddenly apprised him of
his error. From that moment, though, as we have seen, he knew not the
extent of his danger, a fiercer and more tumultuous direction was given
to a passion long controlled. Nothing kindles the fire of love like the
sprinkling of the anxieties of jealousy; it takes then a wilder, a more
resistless flame; it forgets its softness; it ceases to be tender; it
assumes something of the intensity--of the ferocity--of hate.

Arbaces resolved to lose no further time upon cautious and perilous