when illness separated her from his side

Now the anodyne had not produced the effect which it appeared to have done; instead of healthful sleep, it had brought on a kind of light-headed somnolence, in which the mind, preternaturally restless, wandered about its accustomed haunts, waking up its old familiar instincts and inclinations. It was not sleep,— it was not delirium; it was the dream-wakefulness which opium sometimes induces, when every nerve grows tremulously alive, and creates a corresponding activity in the frame, to which it gives a false and hectic vigour. Pisani missed something,— what, he scarcely knew; it was a combination of the two wants most essential to his mental life,— the voice of his wife, the touch of his Familiar. He rose,— he left his bed, he leisurely put on his old dressing-robe, in which he had been wont to compose. He smiled complacently as the associations connected with the garment came over his memory; he walked tremulously across the room, and entered the small cabinet next to his chamber, in which his wife had been accustomed more often to watch than sleep, when illness separated her from his side. The room was desolate and void. He looked round wistfully, and muttered to himself, and then proceeded regularly, and with a noiseless step, through the chambers of the silent house, one by one. He came at last to that in which old Gionetta — faithful to her own safety, if nothing else — nursed herself, in the remotest corner of the house, from the danger of infection. As he glided in,— wan, emaciated, with an uneasy, anxious, searching look in his haggard eyes,— the old woman shrieked aloud, and fell at his feet. He bent over her, passed his thin hands along her averted face, shook his head, and said in a hollow voice,— “I cannot find them; where are they?” “Who, dear master? Oh, have compassion on yourself; they are not here. Blessed saints! this is terrible; he has touched me; I am dead!” “Dead! who is dead? Is any one dead?” “Ah! don’t talk so; you must know it well: my poor mistress,— she caught the fever from you; it is infectious enough to kill a whole city. San Gennaro protect me! My poor mistress, she is dead,— buried, too; and I, your faithful Gionetta, woe is me! Go, go — to — to bed again, dearest master,— go!”