RETRIBUTION. 



159 



eve ? Them she loved not ; but far more had she learned to 

 hold in terror and aversion the fire -flies, the Lucciole which 

 came forth when they arose. 



Once would she have laughed in derision at the simple 

 superstition of poor Bianca ; but upon her it had descended, and 

 in an aggravated form it clung to her guilty spirit. From that 

 Midsummer Eve, when the fire-flies had lighted her in doing her 

 deed of death, they never flitted across her path without recalling 

 its fearful memory. And if the spirit of the murdered maiden 

 had been permitted to revisit earth, and stand before the eye of 

 her destroyer, not more awful to Beatrice would have been 

 the apparition, than the intrusion, into her lonely cell, of a 

 simple harmless Lucciola. 



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