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 su- 

 perstition 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. 



