"Give me the chance!"

He was guilty of this ardent piece of innocence though Violetta had
pitched her voice in the key significant of a secret thing belonging to
two memories that had not always flowed dividedly.

"Like a common coin?" she resumed.

"A heart with a king's head stamped on it like a common coin."

He recollected the sentence. He had once, during the heat of his grief
for Giacomo Piaveni, cast it in her teeth.

Violetta repeated it, as to herself, tonelessly; a method of making an
old unkindness strike back on its author with effect.

"Did we part good friends? I forget," she broke the silence.

"We meet, and we will be the best of friends," said Ammiani.

"Tell your mother I am not three years older than her son,--I am thirty.
Who will make me young again? Tell her, my Carlo, that the genius for
intrigue, of which she accuses me, develops at a surprising rate. As
regards my beauty," the countess put a tooth of pearl on her soft under
lip.

Ammiani assured her that he would find words of his own for her beauty.

"I hear the eulogy, I know the sonnet," said Violetta, smiling, and
described the points of a brunette: the thick black banded hair, the full