Beautiful Rienzi; or, The secret vendetta — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

10 BEAUTIFUL RIENZI. She was unlocking little golden trinkets to show me, but she came without them and knelt before me, with her bright eyes raised. ‘< We must be thorough sisters,” she said, softly. ‘‘ We must love and trust each other as we love and trust no one else ; we must let nothing come between our hearts.” ‘Beautiful one,” I murmured, “each thought of my soul shall be yours—each wish of your heart, my prayer— and you to me the same. Is it not so?’ . And suddenly, with a richly carmine cheek, she clasped me close, and her heart thrilled with a nameless emotion, whose intensity was all unknown by me. On the 6th of October, 1862, I arrived at my new home, and commenced life in New York. I soon was introduced to my sister’s gay friends, and I found she was the belle of her circle ; none so regal, none so lovely as she. At ball and concert, reunion or drive, she reigned supreme, by right of her intellectual powers and matchless loveliness. They called her ‘‘The Beautiful Rienzi,” and my head was almost turned with triumph. I worshiped her with the fanatical enthusiasm of a devotee, and more deeply as the days went on, and often my father laughed and said that Isolina was my first love. She may have been. With secret exultation I watched the uniform firmness with which she checked the devotion of her many admirers, the serene sim- plicity with which she passed through adulations, as if un- conscious of them, and brought her deepest tenderness to me. ‘The shimmering dusk was mine to creep close to my sister and drink in her soft perfections, like fondest lover, and in these sweet thotitht hours I learned to ponder something. Though her eyes were clear and open as an infant’s, to my vivid glances, though her lips responded with the ready laughter or the gentle sigh to my varying moods, still sometimes I felt as if her heart were hidden from me, as if her thoughts were not always explained tu me, or her moods translatable. Why those flushes, sweet and strange, sweeping over her tender face when silence fell between us ? Why those wist- ful sighs, which lighted that bosom soft as cygnet-down, even in the midst of my merriest fantasies of talk? My hands might clasp hers iongingly—my eyes appeal, but those CORNUCG OOO S (©)