mind meeting the young lady and telling her all about it."

"Quite out of the question, my dear sir. It is perfectly possible that
the marchese may return from Padua to-morrow night, and what should we
do then? No, no; there is no help for it. Good-bye."

"Stop! Hi! Come back!"

But it was too late. My impetuous visitor was down the staircase and
away before I had descended a single flight in pursuit, and all I could
do was to return to my room and register a vow within my own heart that
I would have nothing to do with this preposterous scheme.

Looking back upon what followed across the interval of fifteen years, I
find that I can really give no satisfactory reason for my having failed
to adhere to this wise resolution. I had no particular feeling of
friendship for Von Rosenau; I did not care two straws about the
Signorina Bianca, whom I had never seen; and certainly I am not, nor
ever was, the sort of person who loves romantic adventures for their
own sake. Perhaps it was good-nature, perhaps it was only an indolent
shrinking from disobliging anybody, that influenced me--it does not
much matter now. Whatever the cause of my yielding may have been, I did
yield. I prefer to pass over in silence the doubts and hesitations which
beset me for the remainder of the day; the arrival, toward evening,
of the piteous note from Von Rosenau, which finally overcame my
weak resistance to his will; and the series of circumstantial false
statements (I blush when I think of them) by means of which I accounted
to my sister for my proposed sudden departure.

Suffice it to say that, very early on the following morning, there might