"It has come--it has come! Oh, yes, it has come at length. Dear Lorenzo, my own Lorenzo, forgive me if I am wild with joy. How I have longed, how I have looked for this letter! longed and looked, till hope itself grew very like despair! and yet what a fool I was to expect it sooner. You would not write till you reached Naples. I knew it well; you told me so. But what a time has it seemed! Oh, those three months between the day of your departure and the day when you wrote--three _short_ months, people would say; three long ages to me--how slowly, how heavily have they passed away! "I believe the sun has shone and the sky been clear, and winter has gone and spring has come again, and the earth, grown weary of having no flowers, is putting out blossoms on every spray, and sprinkling the ground with gems; but every day has been a day of mist and darkness to me, a night of fear and dread. "Consider that I knew nought of your fate--that in every siege or battle that took place my whole hopes, my whole happiness was perilled upon each stroke that fell. I could bear it, dear Lorenzo, if I were near. I could ride with you through the thickest of the fight; no weak terror, no idle cautions should keep you back, or distract your mind, or bate your daring, or paralyse your arm, were I but near to bathe your brow, or pillow your head, or soothe your pain, if you came back sick and wounded. But you were alone, with none but menials near you. In the hour of anguish or of death there was no Leonora to console, to comfort, to tend you, and, at the last, to go hand in hand with you on high, and be your sister in a better world. This is what gave poignancy to all the sorrows of absence. "But why should I plead my cause with you as if you would blame my terror; or think hardly of the anxieties I have felt? I know you can understand them--I know you can sympathise with them. Yes, yes, you have been apprehensive and anxious for me--I see it in every line of your letter--for me, whose days have passed without event or incident, without danger and without fear. "Oh, my beloved, what can be more wearisome, what can be more full of dark, dull dread than those still, eventless days, when, like a prisoner in his solitary cell, our soul sits expecting the blow of fate. "But it has come--the dear assuaging letter has come to tell me that you are safe, that you are well, that you love me still, that your heart yearns for our meeting. It was long upon its way; but I, do believe poor Antonio brought it as fast as he could. I think he knew how I longed for its coming--how I longed for yours.