_May 29, 1886._

Here is Dionea back upon our hands once more! but I cannot send her to
your Excellency. Is it from living among these peasants and
fishing-folk, or is it because, as people pretend, a skeptic is always
superstitious? I could not muster courage to send you Dionea, although
your boys are still in sailor-clothes and your uncle, the Cardinal, is
eighty-four; and as to the Prince, why, he bears the most potent amulet
against Dionea's terrible powers in your own dear capricious person.
Seriously, there is something eerie in this coincidence. Poor Dionea!
I feel sorry for her, exposed to the passion of a once patriarchally
respectable old man. I feel even more abashed at the incredible
audacity, I should almost say sacrilegious madness, of the vile old
creature. But still the coincidence is strange and uncomfortable. Last
week the lightning struck a huge olive in the orchard of Sor Agostino's
house above Sarzana. Under the olive was Sor Agostino himself, who was
killed on the spot; and opposite, not twenty paces off, drawing water
from the well, unhurt and calm, was Dionea. It was the end of a sultry
afternoon: I was on a terrace in one of those villages of ours, jammed,
like some hardy bush, in the gash of a hill-side. I saw the storm rush
down the valley, a sudden blackness, and then, like a curse, a flash, a
tremendous crash, re-echoed by a dozen hills. "I told him," Dionea said
very quietly, when she came to stay with me the next day (for Sor
Agostino's family would not have her for another half-minute), "that if
he did not leave me alone Heaven would send him an accident."

_July 15, 1886_.

My book? Oh, dear Donna Evelina, do not make me blush by talking of my