Chapter 4 - Page 2

a suitable finish to a style so gorgeous, and in which luxury and taste
were blended in equal profusion.

The building, which, on two of its sides, literally rose from out the
water, was, as usual, erected around a dark court. Following its
different faces, the eye might penetrate, by many a door, open at that
hour for the passage of the air from off the sea, through long suites of
rooms, furnished and fitted in the manner described, all lighted by
shaded lamps that spread a soft and gentle glow around. Passing without
notice ranges of reception and sleeping rooms--the latter of a
magnificence to mock the ordinary wants of the body--we shall at once
introduce the reader into the part of the palace where the business of
the tale conducts us.

At the angle of the dwelling on the side of the smaller of the two
canals, and most remote from the principal water-avenue of the city on
which the edifice fronted, there was a suite of apartments, which, while
it exhibited the same style of luxury and magnificence as those first
mentioned in its general character, discovered greater attention in its
details to the wants of ordinary life. The hangings were of the richest
velvets or of glossy silks, the mirrors were large and of exquisite
truth, the floors of the same gay and pleasing colors, and the walls
were adorned with their appropriate works of art. But the whole was
softened down to a picture of domestic comfort. The tapestries and
curtains hung in careless folds, the beds admitted of sleep, and the
pictures were delicate copies by the pencil of some youthful amateur,
whose leisure had been exercised in this gentle and feminine employment.

The fair being herself, whose early instruction had given birth to so
many skilful imitations of the divine expression of Raphael, or to the
vivid tints of Titian, was at that hour in her privacy, discoursing with
her ghostly adviser, and one of her own sex, who had long discharged the
joint trusts of instructor and parent. The years of the lady of the
palace were so tender that, in a more northern region, she would
scarcely have been deemed past the period of childhood, though in her
native land, the justness and maturity of her form, and the expression
of a dark, eloquent eye, indicated both the growth and the intelligence
of womanhood.

"For this good counsel I thank you, my father, and my excellent Donna
Florinda will thank you still more, for your opinions are so like her
own, that I sometimes admire the secret means by which experience
enables the wise and the good to think so much alike, on a matter of so
little personal interest."

A slight but furtive smile struggled around the mortified mouth of the
Carmelite, as he listened to the