to let this distinguished couple pass, and some of us stood on tiptoe to
get a glimpse of them; for San Silvestro is a man of no small importance
in the political and diplomatic world, and his wife enjoys quite a
European fame for beauty and amiability, having had opportunities of
displaying both these attractive gifts at the several courts where she
has acted as Italian ambassadress. They made their way quickly up the
long room,--she short, rather sallow, inclined toward embonpoint, but
with eyes whose magnificence was rivalled only by that of her diamonds;
he bald-headed, fat, gray-haired, covered with orders,--and were soon
out of sight. I followed them with a sigh which caused my neighbour to
ask me jocosely whether the marchesa was an old flame of mine.

"Far from it," I answered. "Only the sight of her reminded me of bygone
days. Dear, dear me! how time does slip on! It is fifteen years since I
saw her last."

I moved away, looking down rather ruefully at the waistcoat to whose
circumference fifteen years have made no trifling addition, and
wondering whether I was really as much altered and aged in appearance as
the marchesa was.

Fifteen years--it is no such very long time; and yet I dare say that the
persons principally concerned in the incident which I am about to relate
have given up thinking about it as completely as I had done, until the
sound of that lady's name, and the sight of her big black eyes, recalled
it to me, and set me thinking of the sunny spring afternoon on which
my sister Anne and I journeyed from Verona to Venice, and of her naive
exclamations of delight on finding herself in a real gondola, gliding
smoothly down the Grand Canal. My sister Anne is by some years my
senior. She is what might be called an old lady now, and she certainly