And now the story is fairly afloat, and we follow it with an interest that grows in proportion as the plot advances, rising in dramatic power at every chapter. We know that Valenzano is not to be trusted, that he has in him all the elements of a faithless lover and a cruel husband; but we surrender ourselves all the same to the charm of his manner, his genius, his irresistible fascinations. The love-making is as warm as the author dares to make it in a country where the freedom of Anglo-Saxon courtship is unknown, and where the course of true love runs smoothly between the contracting families on one side and the family lawyers on the other. Ginevra goes forth to her new life with a mixture of delight and fear that are like the foreshadowing of the flickered destiny that awaits her, and Livia’s voice strikes like a note of painful warning in the concert of the family joy and triumph and congratulation, when she reminds Ginevra that “marriage is like death”—a thing that we wait and watch for, but never know until we have passed the gates and it is too late to turn back. The description of the bridal festivities, when she goes home to her husband’s palace, and, worn out by the grandeur and the glare, takes refuge alone in the quiet starlight, and removes the circlet of glittering jewels from her brow, that cannot bear the pressure any longer, presents one of those pictures of life in the great Italian world that Mrs. Craven excels in depicting. Life has now become like an enchanted dream to Ginevra. But the first touch of the awakening reality is not long delayed. One night, when the moon was high in the blue heavens and flooding earth and sea with a mystic glory, Ginevra and Lorenzo were sitting on the terrace, listening to the water lapping on the shore, to the nightingales trilling in the ilex groves; the young wife, hushed into silence by the ecstatic beauty of the scene, laid her hand upon her husband’s arm and whispered to him, “Let us lift up our hearts in prayer for one moment, and give thanks for all this beauty.” Lorenzo bent on her a look of tenderest love, and then murmured with a smile, as if answering the poetic folly of a child, “‘Beatrice in suso, ed io in lei guardava.’[71] Thine eyes are my heaven, Ginevra. I feel no need to raise my own any higher.” A cold chill like the first suspicion of a great sorrow crept over the young wife. But Lorenzo quickly chased it away, and she tries to banish the memory of it. But we do not forget it. Slight as the incident is, it has all the import of the first growl of the distant thunder, the small patch of cloud, “no bigger than a man’s hand,” upon the summer sky, that are the certain forerunners of the storm.