No sooner was Guasconti alone in his chamber than the image of
Beatrice came back to his passionate musings, invested with all
the witchery that had been gathering around it ever since his
first glimpse of her, and now likewise imbued with a tender
warmth of girlish womanhood. She was human; her nature was
endowed with all gentle and feminine qualities; she was worthiest
to be worshipped; she was capable, surely, on her part, of the
height and heroism of love. Those tokens which he had hitherto
considered as proofs of a frightful peculiarity in her physical
and moral system were now either forgotten, or, by the subtle
sophistry of passion transmitted into a golden crown of
enchantment, rendering Beatrice the more admirable by so much as
she was the more unique. Whatever had looked ugly was now
beautiful; or, if incapable of such a change, it stole away and
hid itself among those shapeless half ideas which throng the dim
region beyond the daylight of our perfect consciousness. Thus did
he spend the night, nor fell asleep until the dawn had begun to
awake the slumbering flowers in Dr. Rappaccini's garden, whither
Giovanni's dreams doubtless led him. Up rose the sun in his due
season, and, flinging his beams upon the young man's eyelids,
awoke him to a sense of pain. When thoroughly aroused, he became
sensible of a burning and tingling agony in his hand--in his
right hand--the very hand which Beatrice had grasped in her own
when he was on the point of plucking one of the gemlike flowers.
On the back of that hand there was now a purple print like that
of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon
his wrist.

Oh, how stubbornly does love,--or even that cunning semblance of
love which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of