An hour had elapsed, and he had watched her through many a stately measure in the pompous dances of her country, and heard her light jest and her gay laugh, and saw the same haughty fire in her magnificent black eyes, through all! Jealousy has often been described, and the burning words of the poet have wrought out an appalling picture; but if, during that hour, each wild throb of his bursting heart, if each shooting fire of his seething brain, if the madness and the agony and the fierce black promptings that fashioned each thought into shape, and called it _murder_! could have been conveyed in words or upon canvas to the minds of less volcanic natures, they would have laughed to scorn the artist or the author, and accused him of conjuring up the Titan agonies of hell to confine them in the contracted space afforded by the heart of a mere mortal man!
He turned from the revellers, sick and dizzy, and gazed out upon the night. The scene was as fair a one as God's smile ever lighted into beauty. The moon--floating in a sea of blue, cloudless, with the exception of one fleecy-looking mass of vapor that covered a small space like a veil of silver tissue--poured a flood of radiance upon a garden (surrounding the house on three sides) filled with rare exotics, and in the distance the steeples of the city rose up towards the sky, as if formed of luminous mist. The stars, too, were scattered round night's queen in rich profusion, and the air was fragrant with the breath of orange-blossoms. The Venetian, even in that land of sunshine and of flowers--his native Italy--had never looked upon as beautiful a scene. But it suggested no soothing fancies! It only revived the memory of hours of which it was now madness to think! Hours that were freighted with dreams and aspirations as lovely as itself! Hours that were passed--and forever; and aspirations that were coffined and dead! His brain seemed bursting with the heat of the room, and, as the window was a casement but a few feet from the ground, he sprang out, and walked with a hasty step in a direction in which, from a plashing sound that smote his ear, he hoped to find a spring or fountain. He found his conjecture a correct one, and, stooping down, laved his fevered temples in the liquid, which was as cold as ice, but seemed ineffectual when applied to the terrible fever that consumed him! He threw himself upon a richly sculptured seat that was supported by two marble Dryads on the edge of the fountain, and, in spite of every restraining effort, groaned aloud. He had remained thus for some time, regardless of time, place, everything but a dull leaden weight of misery, when a light footfall on the hard gravel roused him, and, springing from his recumbent position, he was about to conceal himself amid the foliage of the adjoining shrubbery, for he was in no mood for society just then. He also had been heard, however, and a rich, musical voice exclaimed--