While all this was going on, you cannot imagine the agony of mind I endured: weaker than a child, I was prostrated upon a sickbed by a long and wasting illness. My brain was dizzy. I wondered how the sun could shine so joyously on the bay and the city, which lies so magnificently along its spacious margin: to me it was a day of gloomy horror! The bells seemed to toll for the funeral of Despina. My mind was a chaos, and I would have hailed an eruption of Vesuvius, an earthquake, or any horrible convulsion which would have overwhelmed the whole city: but neither came to pass, and I lay stretched on my fever-bed, helpless, forgotten, and miserable. I drank cup after cup of wine; but there seemed a fire within me, which all the waters of the bay would not quench. The pain of my wounds, the wine I drank so rashly, and the fever of mind and body, soon made me delirious, and Santugo alone restrained me from sallying, sword in hand, into the crowded streets, to search for some imaginary foe. That night, while yet the fever raged within me, and my brain whirled with the champagne I had drank, I arose, dressed, and armed myself, and issuing forth soon found my way to the closed gates of the convent. The streets were silent and dark; my thoughts were strange: even while my head swam and my knees tottered I imagined that I had the strength of a Hercules. Aware that I was mad with fever and wine, my pranks had some of the caution of sanity in them, and I shrank beneath the deep shadow of the cloisters when a passenger approached, or the moon streamed its light between the fleecy clouds which the south-west wind piled in gleaming masses over Naples. At times I laughed bitterly; anon I wrung my hands, and cried aloud, "Despina—Despina! Anima mia!" and chanted some of our merry madrigals, till the hollow cloisters and the long vista of the empty street, gave back the ravings of folly and despair.