For one moment, one single moment, the Spaniard glared upon him, his face bearing a look of concentrated venomous hate, then, snatching from its jewelled sheath a short stiletto, he sprang with the bound of an enraged panther upon his foe. Taken unprepared--for, the moment his adversary was disarmed, he had dropped the point of his own weapon--Zanotti staggered and fell, and the next instant the dagger was, as it seemed, plunged up to the very hilt in his heart.
Drawing the weapon from its still palpitating sheath, he wiped the blade, and then, with hands wet with her lover's blood, took the form of Leonora, yet happily insensible, and bore it to the palazzo. There was still revelry and mirth within.
Years have passed; it is night, and the stars are scattered over the broad, clear face of heaven, an archipelago of worlds. There has been a thunder storm during the afternoon, and large rain-drops still burden the foliage and the grass, sparkling like a maiden's bridal tears. The sky hangs, as it were, in quiet fondness over the earth, and the night-wind is sighing love tales to the flowers.
In a garden, situated a few miles from Cordova, which incloses within its high walls a lightly, but tastefully built edifice of considerable size, are assembled some six or eight persons of both sexes. Their attitudes and occupations are various. One young girl reclines negligently, but gracefully, on the still damp grass, and touches the chords of a guitar with no unskilful hand; a fine-looking man, in the prime of life, paces up and down a long avenue, and seems to be absorbed in meditation; and another, a lady, is weaving flowers into garlands. She is a splendid-looking woman, of perhaps five-and-thirty years of age, with those large, liquid black eyes that seem to absorb and reflect back to you a portion of your own soul. Her look, however, is sad and hopeless, even her smile giving but a pale, wintry gleam. Ever and anon she sighs, too, and talks to herself in a tone unintelligible to the ear, but breathing a sad, Æolian strain to the heart. Her eye wanders in bewilderment, seeking imagined forms. Her emotions seem to be all mute, expressionless, without a language, and translatable only by signs. _It is Leonora; she is crazed!_