A single person remained depressed and unhappy--the signora herself. I constantly surprised her lovely blue eyes, filled with tears, fastened upon me with an indescribable expression of affection and grief. She could not accustom herself to see me working so. If I had been her own son she could not have been more grieved to see me carrying burdens and standing in the rain. Indeed, her solicitude vexed me a little, and the efforts she made to conceal it made it even more painful to her. An entirely unforeseen revolution of sentiment had taken place in her. That love which had hitherto been, as she herself told me, her torment and her joy, seemed now to cause her naught but shame and consternation. She no longer avoided opportunities to be alone with me, as she used to do; on the contrary, she sought them; but, as soon as I knelt at her feet, she would burst into sobs and change the hours promised to the joys of love into hours of painful emotion. I strove in vain to understand what was taking place in her heart. I could obtain nothing but vague replies, always kind and affectionate, but incoherent, which caused me the utmost perplexity. I had no idea what to do to comfort her and strengthen that discouraged heart. I was consumed by desire, and it seemed to me that an hour of mutual effusion and passion would have been more eloquent than all that talk and all those tears; but I felt too much respect and devotion for her not to sacrifice my transports of passion to her. I felt that it would be very easy to take her by surprise, weak as she was in body and mind; but I dreaded the tears of the next day too much, and I wished to owe my happiness to her confidence and love alone. That day did not come, and I must say, to the discredit of feminine weakness, that, if I had shown less delicacy and unselfishness, my desires would have been fully gratified. I had hoped that Bianca would encourage me; I soon discovered that, on the contrary, she was afraid of me, and that she shuddered at my approach, as if crime and remorse approached with me. I succeeded in reassuring her only to see her plunge into still deeper dejection, and upbraid fate, as if it had not been in her power to put a better face upon her destiny. Then, too, a secret sense of shame helped to crush that shrinking heart. Religion took possession of her more and more completely; her confessor controlled her and terrified her. He forbade her to have lovers, and, although she resisted him when it was a question of Signor Lanfranchi and Signor Montalegri, she had not the same courage with respect to me. I succeeded little by little in extorting from her a confession of all her sufferings and internal struggles. She had confessed to the confessor all the details of our love, and he had declared that that low, criminal affection was a heinous crime. He had forbidden her to think of marriage with me, even more peremptorily than to give way to her passion; and he had frightened