himself with the ingenious felicity of a clever head and cool heart. He
had left England for Rome with the avowed purpose and sincere resolution
of studying the divine masterpieces of art; but pleasure had soon
allured him from ambition, and he quitted the gloomy palaces of Rome for
the gay shores and animated revelries of Naples. Here he had fallen in
love--deeply in love, as he said and thought--with a young person
celebrated at Naples, Isabel di Pisani. She was the only daughter of an
Italian by an English mother. The father had known better days; in his
prosperity he had travelled, and won in England the affections of a lady
of some fortune. He had been induced to speculate; he lost his all; he
settled at Naples, and taught languages and music. His wife died when
Isabel, christened from her mother, was ten years old. At sixteen she
came out on the stage; two years afterwards her father departed this
life, and Isabel was an orphan.

Glyndon, a man of pleasure and a regular attendant at the theatre, had
remarked the young actress behind the scenes; he fell in love with her,
and he told her so. The girl listened to him, perhaps from vanity,
perhaps from ambition, perhaps from coquetry; she listened, and allowed
but few stolen interviews, in which she permitted no favor to the
Englishman it was one reason why he loved her so much.

The day following that on which our story opens, Glyndon was riding
alone by the shores of the Neapolitan sea, on the other side of the
Cavern of Pausilippo. It was past noon; the sun had lost its early
fervor, and a cool breeze sprang voluptuously from the sparkling sea.
Bending over a fragment of stone near the roadside, he perceived the
form of a man; and when he approached he recognized Zicci.

The Englishman saluted him courteously. "Have you discovered some