Week after week, month after month elapsed, without making any change in my circumstances.  The vital flame, which had seemed nearly extinct when first I met my father, kept fluttering on without any apparent diminution.  I watched him constantly, faithfully—­I had almost said patiently.  I knew that his death alone would set me free; yet I never at any moment wished it.  I felt too glad to be able to make any atonement for past disobedience; and, denied as I had been all endearments of relationship in my early days, my heart yearned towards a father, who, in his age and helplessness, had thrown himself entirely on me for comfort.  My passion for Bianca gained daily more force from absence; by constant meditation it wore itself a deeper and deeper channel.  I made no new friends nor acquaintances; sought none of the pleasures of Naples which my rank and fortune threw open to me.  Mine was a heart that confined itself to few objects, but dwelt upon those with the intenser passion.  To sit by my father, and administer to his wants, and to meditate on Bianca in the silence of his chamber, was my constant habit.  Sometimes I amused myself with my pencil in portraying the image that was ever present to my imagination.  I transferred to canvas every look and smile of hers that dwelt in my heart.  I showed them to my father in hopes of awakening an interest in his bosom for the mere shadow of my love; but he was too far sunk in intellect to take any more than a child-like notice of them.

When I received a letter from Bianca it was a new source of solitary luxury.  Her letters, it is true, were less and less frequent, but they were always full of assurances of unabated affection.  They breathed not the frank and innocent warmth with which she expressed herself in conversation, but I accounted for it from the embarrassment which inexperienced minds have often to express themselves upon paper.  Filippo assured me of her unaltered constancy.  They both lamented in the strongest terms our continued separation, though they did justice to the filial feeling that kept me by my father’s side.

Nearly eighteen months elapsed in this protracted exile.  To me they were so many ages.  Ardent and impetuous by nature, I scarcely know how I should have supported so long an absence, had I not felt assured that the faith of Bianca was equal to my own.  At length my father died.  Life went from him almost imperceptibly.  I hung over him in mute affliction, and watched the expiring spasms of nature.  His last faltering accents whispered repeatedly a blessing on me—­alas! how has it been fulfilled!

When I had paid due honors to his remains, and laid them in the tomb of our ancestors, I arranged briefly my affairs; put them in a posture to be easily at my command from a distance, and embarked once more, with a bounding heart, for Genoa.