and etherealized, glowing with a kind of interior ecstasy. He seemed to
move from the shadow of the orange-trees with a backward floating of his
lustrous garments, as if borne on a cloud just along the surface of
the ground; and in his hand he held the lily-spray, all radiant with a
silvery, living light, just as the monk had suggested to her a divine
flower might be. Agnes seemed to herself to hold her breath and marvel
with a secret awe, and, as often happens in dreams, she wondered to
herself,--"Was this stranger, then, indeed, not even mortal, not even a
king's brother, but an angel?--How strange," she said to herself, "that
I should never have seen it in his eyes!" Nearer and nearer the vision
drew, and touched her forehead with the lily, which seemed dewy and
icy cool; and with the contact it seemed to her that a delicious
tranquillity, a calm ecstasy, possessed her soul, and the words were
impressed in her mind, as if spoken in her ear, "The Lord hath sealed
thee for his own!"--and then, with the wild fantasy of dreams, she saw
the cavalier in his wonted form and garments, just as he had kneeled to
her the night before, and he said, "Oh, Agnes! Agnes! little lamb of
Christ, love me and lead me!"--and in her sleep it seemed to her that
her heart stirred and throbbed with a strange, new movement in answer to
those sad, pleading eyes, and thereafter her dream became more troubled.

The sea was beginning now to brighten with the reflection of the coming
dawn in the sky, and the flickering fire of Vesuvius was waxing sickly
and pale; and while all the high points of rocks were turning of a rosy
purple, in the weird depths of the gorge were yet the unbroken shadows
and stillness of night. But at the earliest peep of dawn the monk had
risen, and now, as he paced up and down the little garden, his morning
hymn mingled with Agnes's dreams,--words strong with all the nerve of
the old Latin, which, when they were written, had scarcely ceased to be
the spoken tongue of Italy.