Giulietta sat by her a moment, till she felt, from the relaxing of the little hand, that the reaction of fatigue and intense excitement was beginning to take place. Nature would assert her rights, and the heavy curtain of sleep fell on the weary little head. Quietly extinguishing the lights, Giulietta left the room, locking the door.
Agnes was so entirely exhausted with bodily fatigue and mental agitation that she slept soundly till awakened by the beams of the morning sun. Her first glance up at the gold-embroidered curtains of her bed occasioned a bewildered surprise;--she raised herself and looked around, slowly recovering her consciousness and the memory of the strange event which had placed her where she was. She rose hastily and went to the window to look out. This window was in a kind of circular tower projecting from the side of the building, such as one often sees in old Norman architecture;--it overhung not only a wall of dizzy height, but a precipice with a sheer descent of some thousand feet; and far below, spread out like a map in the distance, lay a prospect of enchanting richness. The eye might wander over orchards of silvery olives, plantations with their rows of mulberry-trees supporting the vines, now in the first tender spring green, scarlet fields of clover, and patches where the young corn was just showing its waving blades above the brown soil. Here and there rose tufts of stone-pines with their dark umbrella-tops towering above all other foliage, while far off in the blue distance a silvery belt of glittering spangles showed where the sea closed in the horizon-line. So high was the perch, so distant and dreamy the prospect, that Agnes felt a sensation of giddiness, as if she were suspended over it in the air,--and turned away from the window, to look again at what seemed to her the surprising and unheard-of splendors of the apartment. There lay her simple peasant garb on the rich velvet couch,--a strange sight in the midst of so much luxury. Having dressed herself, she sat down, and, covering her face with her hands, tried to reflect calmly on the position in which she was placed.
With the education she had received, she could look on this strange interruption of her pilgrimage only as a special assault upon her faith, instigated by those evil spirits that are ever setting themselves in conflict with the just. Such trials had befallen saints of whom she had read. They had been assailed by visions of worldly ease and luxury suddenly presented before them, for which they were tempted to deny their faith and sell their souls. Was it not, perhaps, as a punishment for having admitted the love of an excommunicated heretic into her heart, that this sore trial had been permitted to come upon her? And if she should fail? She shuddered, when she recalled the severe and terrible manner in which Father Francesco had warned her against yielding to the solicitations of an earthly love. To her it seemed as if that holy man must have been inspired with a prophetic foresight of her present position, and warned her against it. Those awful words came burning into her mind as when they seemed to issue like the voice of a spirit from the depths of the confessional: "_If ever you should yield to his love, and turn back from this heavenly marriage to follow him, you will accomplish his damnation and your own._"