he not fled with her as his companion?  Glyndon never paused to consider if there are no distinctions between one kind of love and another.  Where, too, was the great offence of yielding to a temptation which only existed for the brave?  Had not the mystic volume which Mejnour had purposely left open, bid him but “Beware of fear”?  Was not, then, every wilful provocative held out to the strongest influences of the human mind, in the prohibition to enter the chamber, in the possession of the key which excited his curiosity, in the volume which seemed to dictate the mode by which the curiosity was to be gratified?  As rapidly these thoughts passed over him, he began to consider the whole conduct of Mejnour either as a perfidious design to entrap him to his own misery, or as the trick of an imposter, who knew that he could not realise the great professions he had made.  On glancing again over the more mysterious threats and warnings in Mejnour’s letter, they seemed to assume the language of mere parable and allegory,—­the jargon of the Platonists and Pythagoreans.  By little and little, he began to consider that the very spectra he had seen—­even that one phantom so horrid in its aspect—­were but the delusions which Mejnour’s science had enable him to raise.  The healthful sunlight, filling up every cranny in his chamber, seemed to laugh away the terrors of the past night.  His pride and his resentment nerved his habitual courage; and when, having hastily dressed himself, he rejoined Paolo, it was with a flushed cheek and a haughty step.

“So, Paolo,” said he, “the Padrone, as you call him, told you to expect and welcome me at your village feast?”

“He did so by a message from a wretched old cripple.  This surprised me at the time, for I thought he was far distant; but these great philosophers make a joke of two or three hundred leagues.”

“Why did you not tell me you had heard from Mejnour?”

“Because the old cripple forbade me.”

“Did you not see the man afterwards during the dance?”

“No, Excellency.”

“Humph!”

“Allow me to serve you,” said Paolo, piling Glyndon’s plate, and then filling his glass.  “I wish, signor, now the Padrone is gone,—­not,” added Paolo, as he cast rather a frightened and suspicious glance round the room, “that I mean to say anything disrespectful of him,—­I wish, I say, now that he is gone, that you would take pity on yourself, and ask your own heart what your youth was meant for?  Not to bury yourself alive in these old ruins, and endanger body and soul by studies which I am sure no saint could approve of.”

“Are the saints so partial, then, to your own occupations, Master Paolo?”

“Why,” answered the bandit, a little confused, “a gentleman with plenty of pistoles in his purse need not, of necessity, make it his profession to take away the pistoles of other people!  It is a different thing for us poor rogues.  After all, too, I always devote a tithe of my gains to the Virgin; and I share the rest charitably with the poor.  But eat, drink, enjoy yourself; be absolved by your confessor for any little peccadilloes and don’t run too long scores at a time,—­that’s my advice.  Your health, Excellency!  Pshaw, signor, fasting, except on the days prescribed to a good Catholic, only engenders phantoms.”