Yet these adverse circumstances, which, in the harder, the more prudent, the more self-denying, perhaps the more virtuous minds, that are formed beneath the northern skies, would have been an inducement to wrestle against love so placed, only contributed to feed and to strengthen theirs by an opposition which has ever its attraction for romance.

They found frequent, though short, opportunities of meeting--not quite alone, but only in the conniving presence of Benedetta: sometimes in the public gardens, sometimes amidst the vast and deserted ruins by which the house of Rienzi was surrounded.

They surrendered themselves, without much question of the future, to the excitement--the elysium--of the hour: they lived but from day to day; their future was the next time they should meet; beyond that epoch, the very mists of their youthful love closed in obscurity and shadow which they sought not to penetrate: and as yet they had not arrived at that period of affection when there was danger of their fall,--their love had not passed the golden portal where Heaven ceases and Earth begins.

Everything for them was the poetry, the vagueness, the refinement,--not the power, the concentration, the mortality,--of desire! The look--the whisper--the brief pressure of the hand, at most, the first kisses of love, rare and few,--these marked the human limits of that sentiment which filled them with a new life, which elevated them as with a new soul.
The roving tendencies of Adrian were at once fixed and centered; the dreams of his tender mistress had awakened to a life dreaming still, but "rounded with a truth." All that earnestness, and energy, and fervour of emotion, which, in her brother, broke forth in the schemes of patriotism and the aspirations of power, were, in Irene, softened down into one object of existence, one concentration of soul,--and that was love.

Yet, in this range of thought and action, so apparently limited, there was, in reality, no less boundless a sphere than in the wide space of her brother's many-pathed ambition.