Beautiful Rienzi; or, The Secret Vendetta — page 33: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

26 BEAUTIFUL RIENZI. | left me for a while. When again I was able to rise, thesobs had died to an awful silence. The crisis had come, was passed, and that torn heart had borne its grief alone. I had an indisposition which confined me to my bed a fortnight, having contracted a heavy cold attended by a fever. One day I was sitting by the dressing-room fire in a deep velvet rocking-chair a convalescent, with a shawl cosily pinned round me, and my empty medicine bottle on the coal-scuttle, the kindest of doctors having announced that it need not be refilled. Two young ladies had just finished a morning call of con- gratulation, namely, Miss Cranstown. the quondam English sovereign, and her pretty sister Belle, the goddess; and Sophie was ushering them down stairs. The elder lady, who, by the way, seemed of a very prying and gossiping disposition, had informed us that Mr. Beau- mont had brought out a new novel, which was taking’the fashionable circles by storm ; that it evidently had modeled its heroine on a certain well-known beauty of our own circle. ** Could we guess who now? It was ten times more weird and exciting even then ‘ Veronica,’ and certainly threw a halo of romance over the heroine which might extend into real life. Wasit possible we had not seen it? One would have thought the first eyes that looked on it would have been—never mind. Get it. Miss Ivanilla, and judge if you never saw people like Rediviva, and her love-crazed Fate, the Shadow.” As soon as the ladies had gone, I turned eagerly to Isolina expecting some indignant protest from her, on the subject of the new book; instead, however, she quietly ignored the subject by taking up a book of poems and beginning to read to me. She was on her guard, for beyond the outward signs of care which the last fortnight’s confinement might have brought, I saw nothing ; her face was calm and placid, her left hand, long and arched, upheld the gilded book in a per- fect curve of grace; it was little enough like the dusky hands which were idly clasped in my lap. | At last I missed what I had never noticed that hand divested of before, a curious double ring, with which I used to toy inthe dusk evenings when we sat together in the GComicbooks: co