provided for, he allowed Jackeymo to write a line to Randal and
communicate his arrival.

Randal lost no time in calling. With his usual adaptability and his
powers of dissimulation, he contrived easily to please Mrs. Riccabocca,
and to increase the good opinion the exile was disposed to form of him.
He engaged Violante in conversation on Italy and its poets. He promised
to bring her books. He began, though more distantly than he could have
desired,--for her sweet stateliness awed him,--the preliminaries of
courtship. He established himself at once as a familiar guest, riding
down daily in the dusk of evening, after the toils of office, and
returning at night. In four or five days he thought he had made great
progress with all. Riccabocca watched him narrowly, and grew absorbed
in thought after every visit. At length one night, when he and Mrs.
Riccabocca were alone in the drawing-room, Violante having retired to
rest, he thus spoke as he filled his pipe,--

"Happy is the man who has no children! Thrice happy he who has no
girls!"

"My dear Alphonso!" said the wife, looking up from the waistband to which
she was attaching a neat mother-o'-pearl button. She said no more; it
was the sharpest rebuke she was in the custom of administering to her
husband's cynical and odious observations. Riccabocca lighted his pipe
with a thread paper, gave three great puffs, and resumed,

"One blunderbuss, four pistols, and a house-dog called Pompey, who would
have made mincemeat of Julius Caesar!"

"He certainly eats a great deal, does Pompey!" said Mrs. Riccabocca,