But the storm will not burst just yet, and meantime we follow Ginevra in her brilliant career, first travelling here and there with her husband, and finally enthroned as a queen in her delightful world at Naples. The first thing that makes us tremble for her is Lorenzo’s startled exclamation of anger—was it?—when he comes upon Donna Faustina’s card amongst those that are left at the young duchess’ door, and the latter, in surprise, asks what it means. He turns it off adroitly, and Ginevra dismisses it from her mind. The interval that follows is bright with incident and pictures of society in Naples and in Paris. We see Lorenzo at work in his studio, where Ginevra sits to him as a model for his Vestal, and where his rapturous admiration of her beauty makes her recoil instinctively as from a homage unworthy of her, too much “of the earth earthly.” And yet this husband, who is almost an unbeliever, who smiles with indulgent fondness on his wife’s ardent piety, is glad enough that she should have religion to guard her from the perils that beset her on all sides; he recognizes the power and utility of her faith, and is careful not to shock it or to let her see how little he really shares it. Lando, the cousin and boon companion of the duke, now comes upon the scene, and for a time we side with Ginevra in her dislike and suspicion of him; but soon we find out our mistake, and acknowledge that, in spite of his loose principles and wild ways, he is kind-hearted and a stanch and loyal friend to Ginevra. He does his best to save both her and Lorenzo, though to the last he is unable to understand why any woman in her right mind should care so much more for her husband’s love than for his fortune, and why the ruin of the latter should be as nothing to her compared to even a passing breach in the former. The scene at the concert, where she first detects Lorenzo at a card-table, and it breaks upon her that her husband is a gambler, is finely introduced, and the conversation of Lando with the terrified young wife is admirably drawn. But we know that the real crisis in her peace and happiness has yet to come, and we hurry on till Donna Faustina enters. Lorenzo disarms us, and almost gains our sympathy for this evil genius of Ginevra, by the frankness with which he tells her story to the latter; but the relations between all three, as he now tries to establish them, are radically false, and it requires no prophetic eye to foresee how they must end. What barrier have either Faustina or Lorenzo to stem the torrent of passion when it breaks loose—outraged love and desire of revenge on her side, and on his the embers of a love that he fancies dead, but which it only needs the vanity of his own undisciplined nature and the spell of her guilty passion to fan into a livelier flame than ever? While the storm is rapidly rising in this direction, Gilbert de Kergy crosses Ginevra’s path; but she is yet far from suspecting that he is the messenger of fate to her, the