find in the card-room. For though the Marchese was no great card-
player, and never touched a card in his own house, he was wont, at
the Circolo, on such occasions as the present, to cast in his lot
with those who so consoled themselves for the years that made the
ball-room no longer their proper territory.

But the Conte Leandro did not find the Marchese among the card-
players.

The events of the evening had already thrown him back again into a
very miserable state of mind, from which the Marchese had been
suffering such torments as the jealous only know, during all the
latter half of the Carnival. It was strange that such a man as the
Marchese Lamberto--it would have seemed passing strange to any of
those his fellow-citizens who had known him, thoroughly as they
supposed, all his life; very strange that such a man, so calm, so
judicious, so little liable to the gusts of passion of any sort; a
man, the even tenor of whose well-regulated life had ever been such
as to expose him rather to the charge of almost apathetic placidity
of temper, should thus suddenly, in the full meridian time of his
mature years, become subject to such violent oscillations of
passion; to such buffetings by storms, blowing now from one and now
from the opposite quarter of the sky. But no length of prosperous
navigation in the quiet waters of a land-locked harbour will give
evidence of the vessel's fitness to encounter the storms and the
waves of the open sea. The storm-wind of a strong passion had, all
at once for the first time, blown in upon the sheltered harbour in
which that placid life had been led.

And yet that storm-wind did not produce the same effect, as it would