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remarks: and there is the signor in such a bustle as I never saw him before; and he has sent me to tell you, Ma'am, to get ready immediately.

Good God, support me! cried Emily, almost fainting: Count Morano is below, then!

No, Ma'amselle, he is not below that I know of, replied Annette; only his Excellenza sent me to desire you would get ready directly to leave Venice, for that the gondolas would be at the steps of the canal in a few minutes; but I must hurry back to my lady, who is just at her wits' end, and knows not which way to turn for haste.

Explain, Annette, explain the meaning of all this before you go, said Emily, so overcome with surprise and timid hope that she had scarcely breath to speak.

Nay, Ma'amselle, that is more than I can do. I only know that the signor is just come home in a very ill humour; that he has had us all called out of our beds, and tells us we are all to leave Venice immediately.

Is Count Morano to go with the signor? said Emily; and whither are we going?

I know neither, Ma'am, for certain; but I heard Ludovico say something about going, after we got to Terra-firma, to the signor's castle among some mountains that he talked of.

The Apennines! said Emily eagerly; O! then I have little to hope!

That is the very place, Ma'am. But cheer up, and do not take it so much to heart, and think what a little time you have to get ready in, and how impatient the signor is. Holy St. Mark! I hear the oars on the canal; and now they come nearer, and now they are dashing at the steps below; it is the gondola, sure enough.

Annette hastened from the room; and Emily prepared for this unexpected flight, not perceiving that any change in her situation could possibly be for the worse. She had scarcely thrown her books and clothes into her travelling-trunk, when receiving a second summons, she went down to her aunt's dressing-room, where she found Montoni impatiently reproving his wife for delay. He went out soon after, to give some further orders to his people, and Emily then inquired the occasion of this hasty journey; but her aunt appeared to be as ignorant as herself, and to undertake the journey with more reluctance.

The family at length embarked, but neither Count Morano nor Cavigni was of the party. Somewhat revived by observing this, Emily, when the gondolieri dashed their oars in the water, and put off from the steps of the portico, felt like a criminal who receives a short reprieve. Her heart beat yet lighter, when they emerged from the canal into the ocean, and lighter still, when they skimmed past the walls of St. Mark, without having stopped to take the Count Morano.

The dawn now began to tint the horizon, and to break upon the shores of the Adriatic. Emily did not venture to ask any questions of Montoni, who sat, for some time, in gloomy silence, and then rolled himself up in his cloak, as if to sleep, while Madame Montoni did the same; but Emily, who could not sleep, undrew one of the little curtains of the gondola, and looked out upon the sea. The rising dawn now enlightened the mountain tops of Friuli; but their lower sides, and the distant waves that rolled at their feet, were still in deep shadow. Emily, sunk in tranquil melancholy, watched the strengthening light spreading upon the ocean, showing progressively Venice with her islets, and the shores of Italy, along which boats with their pointed Latin sails began to move.

The gondolieri were frequently hailed atthis early hour by the market people, as they glided by towards Venice, and the Lagune soon displayed a gay scene of innumerable little barks passing from Terra firma with provisions. Emily gave a last look to that splendid city; but her mind was then occupied by considering the probable events that awaited her in the scenes to which she was removing, and with conjectures concerning the motive of this sudden journey. It appeared, upon calmer consideration, that Montoni was removing her to his secluded castle, because he could there with more probability of success attempt to terrify her into obedience; or that, should its gloomy and sequestered scenes fail of this effect, her forced marriage with the count could there be solemnized with the secrecy which was necessary to the honour of Montoni. The little spirit which this reprieve had recalled now began to fail, and when Emily reached the shore, her mind had sunk into all its former depression.

Montoni did not embark on the Brenta, but pursued his way in carriages across the country to wards the Apennine; during which journey his manner to Emily was so particularly severe, that this alone would have confirmed her late conjecture, had any such confirmation been necessary. Her senses were now dead to the beautiful country through which she travelled. Sometimes she was compelled to smile at the naïveté of Annette, in her remarks on what she saw, and sometimes to sigh, as a scene of peculiar beauty recalled Valancourt to her thoughts, who was indeed seldom absent from them, and of whom she could never hope to hear in the solitude to which she was hastening.

At length the travellers began to ascend among the Apennines. The immense pine-forests which at that period overhung these mountains, and between which the road wound, excluded all view but of the cliffs aspiring above, except that now and then an opening through the dark woods allowed the eye a momentary glimpse of the country below. The gloom of these shades, their solitary silence, except when the breeze swept over their summits, the tremendous precipices of the mountains that came partially to the eye, each assisted to raise the solemnity of Emily's feelings into awe; she saw only images of gloomy grandeur, or of dreadful sublimity, around her; other images, equally gloomy and equally terrible, gleamed on her imagination. She was going she scarcely knew whither, under the dominion of a person from whose arbitrary disposition she had already suffered so much; to marry, perhaps, a man who possessed neither her affection nor esteem; or to endure, beyond the hope of succour, whatever punishment revenge, and that Italian revenge, might dictate. The more she considered what might be the motive of the journey, the more she became convinced that it was for the purpose of concluding her nuptials with Count Morano, with the secrecy which her resolute resistance had made necessary to the honour, if not to the safety, of Montoni. From the deep solitudes into which she was immerging, and from the gloomy castle of which she had heard some mysterious hints, her sick heart recoiled in despair, and she experienced that, though her mind was already oc. cupied by peculiar distress, it was still alive to the influence of new and local circumstance; why else did she shudder at the image of this desolate castle?

As the travellers still ascended among the pineforests, steep rose over steep, the mountains seemed to multiply as they went, and what was the summit of one eminence proved to be only the base of another. At length they reached a little plain, where the drivers stopped to rest the mules, whence a scene of such extent and magnificence opened below, as drew even from Madame Montoni a note of admiration. Emily lost for a moment her sorrows in the immensity of nature. Beyond the amphitheatre of mountains that stretched below, whose tops appeared as numerous almost as the waves of the sea, and whose feet were concealed by the forests-extended the campagna of Italy, where cities and rivers and woods, and all the glow of cultiva tion, were mingled in gay confusion. The Adriatic bounded the horizon, into which the Po and the Brenta, after winding through the whole extent of the landscape, poured their fruitful waves. Emily gazed long on the splendours of the world she was quitting, of which the whole magnificence seemed thus given to her sight only to increase her regret on leaving it: for her, Valancourt alone was in that world; to him alone her heart turned, and for him alone fell her bitter tears.

From this sublime scene the travellers continued to ascend among the pines, if they entered a narrow pass of the mountains, which shut out every feature of the distant country, and in its stead exhibited only tremendous crags impending over the road, where no vestige of humanity, or even of vegetation, appeared, except here and there the trunk and scathed branches of an oak, that hung nearly headlong from the rock into which its strong roots had fastened. This pass, which led into the heart of the Apennine, at length opened to day, and a scene of mountains stretched in long perspec tive, as wild as any the travellers had yet passed,

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