'Such is love!' she sighed, and returned Andrea's kisses.
In her he seemed to possess all those charming women of whom Lorenzo the
Magnificent sang:
'And on every side we find,
Absence, as men say, estranges,
Fancy ranges as the eye ranges,
Out of sight is out of mind.
Love departs and is not love:
As from sight the eye departs
Even so do hearts from hearts;
And at other hands we prove
Fancies love as the eyes rove,
Parted pleasures come again.'
When the summer came, and she was on the point of leaving Rome, she
said to him, without seeking to conceal her gentle emotion--
'When we meet again I know you will not love me any more. That is love.
But think of me always as a friend.'
He did not love her, certainly; nevertheless during the heat and tedium
of the days that followed, certain cadences of that dulcet voice
returned to him like a haunting melody, suggesting visions of a garden,
fresh with splashing fountains, where Bianca wandered in company with
other fair women playing on the viol and singing as in a vignette of the
'Dream of Polyphilo.'
And Bianca passed and was succeeded by others--sometimes two at a time;
but it was finally the little ivory Death's-head which had belonged to
the Cardinal Immenraet, the funereal jewel dedicated to an unknown
Ippolita, that suggested to him the caprice of tempting Donna Ippolita
Albonico.
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