"Not so," returned the young Italian, fixing her large black eyes upon him with a wild and melancholy expression. "I think not of the future—my whole existence is, as it were, absorbed in the present. There is something within me which says, 'Yield to the delicious repose which now stills every beating pulse: life has known no such soothing tranquillity before—it will never know it more.' Ah, Evelyn! you cannot conceive how wretched my life has been—how desolate and how miserable! I am not accustomed to be glad, and to be loved. I cannot help the dread, which haunts me like a perpetual shadow, that fate will exact some terrible penalty for this moment's feeling."
"Nay, my beloved Francesca, this is the vainest folly that ever made an omen of its own weakness."
"Omen!" repeated she in a low, broken voice, that feared the sound of its own words; "omen!—you have said aright. The shadow flung from the soul is an omen; and mine at this very time holds some mysterious communion with its fate. There are some whose web in life has a dark yarn even from the first—dark and brief—a gloomy river, with a short and troubled course. And such is mine. I look back on that which has been,
