‘Thou wouldst break with me, then, Marietta?’ said Gerald, relaxing his hold on her, and turning his eyes fully upon her face.
‘Look down there,’ cried she, pointing with her finger: ‘that street beneath us is narrow enough, but it has two exits: why shouldn’t you take one road, and I the other?’
‘Agreed: so be it, then!’ said Gerald passionately, ‘only remember, this project never came from me.’
‘If there be blame for it, I accept it all,’ said she calmly. ‘These things come ever of caprice, and they go as they come. As your own poet has it:
‘"Si sente che diletta Ma non si sa perché.”’
And with a cold smile and a light motion of the hand, as in adieu, she turned away and left the room. Gerald buried his face between his hands and sobbed as though his heart was breaking. Alternately accusing Marietta and himself of cruelty and injustice, his mind was racked by a conflict, to which nothing offered consolation.
He tried to compose himself to sleep: he lay down on his bed, and endeavoured in many ways to induce that calm spirit which leads to slumber; he even murmured to himself the long-forgotten litanies he had learned, as a student, in the college; but the fever that raged within defied all these attempts, and, foiled in his efforts, he arose and left the house. The day was just dawning, and a pinkish streak of sky could be seen over the mountains of Vail’ Ombrosa, while all the vale of the Arno and Florence itself lay in deep shadow, the great ‘Duomo’ and the tall tower at its side not yet catching the first gleam of the rising sun.
Gerald left the gates of the city, and strode on manfully till he gained the crest of the ‘Bello Sguardo,’ whence the view of the city and its environs is peculiarly fine. Here he sat down to gaze on the scene beneath him; that wondrous map, whose history contains records of mingled greatness, crime, genius, noble patriotism, and of treachery so base that all Europe cannot show its equal; and thus gazing, and thus musing, he sank into deep sleep.