Her youth had been all love, and her age was all superstition.

She was garrulous, fond,--a gossip.

Now she would prattle to the girl of cavaliers and princes at her feet, and now she would freeze her blood with tales and legends, perhaps as old as Greek or Etrurian fable, of demon and vampire,--of the dances round the great walnut-tree at Benevento, and the haunting spell of the Evil Eye.

All this helped silently to weave charmed webs over Viola's imagination that afterthought and later years might labour vainly to dispel.

And all this especially fitted her to hang, with a fearful joy, upon her father's music.