“Is there nothing of love beneath my fair sister’s gloom?” answered Nina. “Do you not call to mind how she loved Adrian Colonna?”
“Does that fantasy hold still?” returned Rienzi, musingly. “Well, and she is fit bride for a monarch.”
“Yet it were an alliance that would, better than one with monarchs, strengthen thy power at Rome!”
“Ay, were it possible; but that haughty race!—Perchance this very masker that so haunted our steps was but her lover. I will look to this. Let us forth, my Nina. Am I well cloaked?”
“Excellently well—and I?”
“The sun behind a cloud.”
“Ah, let us not tarry long; what hour of revel like that when thy hand in mine, this head upon thy bosom, we forget the sorrows we have known, and even the triumphs we have shared?”
Meanwhile, Irene, confused and lost amidst a transport of emotion, already disguised and masked, was threading her way through the crowd back to the staircase of the Lion. With the absence of the Senator that spot had comparatively been deserted. Music and the dance attracted the maskers to another quarter of the wide space. And Irene now approaching, beheld the moonlight fall over the statue, and a solitary figure leaning against the pedestal. She paused, the figure approached, and again she heard the voice of her early love.
“Oh, Irene! recognised even in this disguise,” said Adrian, seizing her trembling hand; “have I lived to gaze again upon that form—to touch this hand? Did not these eyes behold thee lifeless in that fearful vault, which I shudder to recall? By what miracle wert thou raised again? By what means did Heaven spare to this earth one that it seemed already to have placed amongst its angels?”
“Was this, indeed, thy belief?” said Irene, falteringly, but with an accent eloquent of joy. “Thou didst not then willingly desert me? Unjust that I was, I wronged thy noble nature, and deemed that my brother’s fall, my humble lineage, thy brilliant fate, had made thee renounce Irene.”