A carriage drove into the garden, and we did not hear it, we were talking so earnestly. Suddenly the door opened and Princess Grimani appeared.
Alezia uttered a piercing shriek and rushed into her mother's arms, who held her there a long time without speaking; then she fell gasping upon a chair. Her daughter and Lila knelt at her feet and covered her with caresses. I do not know what Nasi said to her, nor what she replied as she pressed his hand. I was rooted to the spot where I stood; I saw Bianca again after ten years. How changed she was! but how touchingly beautiful she still seemed to me, despite the loss of her early bloom!
Her great blue eyes, sunken in their orbits which tears had deepened, seemed even softer and sweeter than I remembered them. Her pallor moved me deeply, and her figure, more slender and slightly bent, seemed to me better suited to that loving, weary heart. She did not recognize me; and when Nasi called me by name she seemed surprised; for the name Lelio told her nothing. At last I decided to speak to her; but she had no sooner heard the first word than she sprang to her feet, recognizing me by my voice, and held out her arms to me, crying:
"O my dear Nello!"
"Nello!" cried Alezia, rising hastily; "Nello the gondolier?"
"Did you not know him?" said her mother; "haven't you recognized him until this moment?"
"Ah! I understand," said Alezia in a stifled voice, "I understand why he cannot love me!"
And she fell at full length on the floor in a swoon.
I passed the rest of the day in the salon with Nasi and Checca. Alezia was in bed, wildly hysterical and delirious. Her mother alone was with her. We were all very melancholy at supper. At last, about ten o'clock, Bianca came and told us that her daughter was calmer, and that she would soon return and talk with me. About midnight she returned, and we passed two hours together, while Nasi and Checca sat with Alezia, who was much better and had asked to see them. Bianca was as lovely as an angel with me. Under any other circumstances she might, perhaps, have been embarrassed by her title of princess and her new social position; but motherly affection stifled all other feelings. She thought of nothing but expressing her gratitude to me; she did so in the most flattering terms and with the most affectionate manner imaginable. She did not seem to have dreamed for a single instant that I could hesitate to give her daughter back to her and put aside all thought of marrying her. I was grateful to her for it. It was the only way in which she gave me to understand that the past was still living in her memory. I had the delicacy to refrain from alluding to it; however, I should have been very happy if she had not feared to talk of it with perfect freedom; it would have been a greater token of esteem than all the rest.
Doubtless Alezia had told her everything; doubtless she had made a general confession of all the thoughts of her whole life, from the night on which she had surprised her love-affair with the gondolier down to that on which she had confided that secret to Lelio, the actor. Doubtless the mutual suffering caused by such an outpouring of the heart had been purified by the flame of maternal and filial love. Bianca told me that her daughter was calm and resigned, and that she hoped to see me some day and express her unchangeable affection, her great esteem, her cordial gratitude —— In a word, the sacrifice was consummated.