Montefiore, if the silence, if the night, if Juana herself had not
seemed so amorous. Montefiore stood still, intoxicated with an unknown
happiness, possibly that of Satan beholding heaven through a rift of
the clouds which form its enclosure.

"As soon as I saw you," he said in pure Tuscan, and in the modest tone
of voice so peculiarly Italian, "I loved you. My soul and my life are
now in you, and in you they will be forever, if you will have it so."

Juana listened, inhaling from the atmosphere the sound of these words
which the accents of love made magnificent.

"Poor child! how have you breathed so long the air of this dismal
house without dying of it? You, made to reign in the world, to inhabit
the palace of a prince, to live in the midst of fetes, to feel the
joys which love bestows, to see the world at your feet, to efface all
other beauty by your own which can have no rival--you, to live here,
solitary, with those two shopkeepers!"

Adroit question! He wished to know if Juana had a lover.

"True," she replied. "But who can have told you my secret thoughts?
For the last few months I have nearly died of sadness. Yes, I would
_rather_ die than stay longer in this house. Look at that embroidery;
there is not a stitch there which I did not set with dreadful
thoughts. How many times I have thought of escaping to fling myself
into the sea! Why? I don't know why,--little childish troubles, but
very keen, though they are so silly. Often I have kissed my mother at
night as one would kiss a mother for the last time, saying in my
heart: 'To-morrow I will kill myself.' But I do not die. Suicides go