One last backward glance at the eastern windows turning to gold; at the sea blushing in the first glance of the day-king; at the waving trees and swelling meadows, and gray, old ivy-grown front, and then he passed down the avenue, out through the massive entrance-gates, and was gone.
CHAPTER XV.
AFTER FIVE YEARS.
oonlight falling like a silvery veil over Venice—a crystal clear crescent in a purple sky shimmering on palace and prison, churches, squares and canals, on the gilded gondolas, and the flitting forms passing like noiseless shadows to and fro.
A young lady leaned from a window of a vast Venetian hotel, gazing thoughtfully at the silver-lighted landscape, so strange, so unreal, so dream-like, to her unaccustomed eyes. A young lady, stately and tall, with a pale, proud face, deep, dark eyes, solemn, shining, fathomless, like mountain tarns; floating dark ringlets and a statuesque sort of beauty that was perfect in its way. She was dressed in trailing robes of crape and bombazine, and the face, turned to the moonlight, was cold and still.
She turned her eyes from the moonlit canal, down which dark gondolas floated to the music of the gay gondolier's song; once, as an English voice in the piazza below, sung a stave of a jingling barcarole,