the girl might
say or do. She understood less and less, after they had disembarked in
England and begun to travel southward; and she understood least of all
when, in the middle of the winter, the event came off with which, in
imagination, she had tried to familiarize herself, but which, when it
occurred, seemed to her beyond measure strange and dreadful. It took
place at Genoa, for Georgina had made up her mind that there would be
more privacy in a big town than in a little; and she wrote to America
that both Mrs. Portico and she had fallen in love with the place and
would spend two or three months there. At that time people in the United
States knew much less than to-day about the comparative attractions
of foreign cities, and it was not thought surprising that absent
New Yorkers should wish to linger in a seaport where they might find
apartments, according to Georgina's report, in a palace painted in
fresco by Vandyke and Titian. Georgina, in her letters, omitted, it will
be seen, no detail that could give color to Mrs. Portico's long stay at
Genoa. In such a palace--where the travellers hired twenty gilded rooms
for the most insignificant sum--a remarkably fine boy came into the
world. Nothing could have been more successful and comfortable than
this transaction. Mrs. Portico was almost appalled at the facility and
felicity of it. She was by this time in a pretty bad way, and--what
had never happened to her before in her life--she suffered from chronic
depression of spirits. She hated to have to lie, and now she was lying
all the time. Everything she wrote home, everything that had been said
or done in connection with their stay in Genoa, was a lie. The way
they remained indoors to avoid meeting chance compatriots was a lie.
Compatriots, in Genoa, at that period, were very rare; but nothing could
exceed the businesslike completeness of Georgina's precautions. Her
nerves, her self-possession, her apparent want of feeling, excited on
Mrs. Portico's part a kind of gloomy suspense; a morbid anxiety to see
how far her companion would go took possession of the excellent woman,
who, a few months before, hated to fix her mind on disagreeable things.

Georgina went very far indeed; she did everything in her power to
dissimulate the origin of her child. The record of its birth was made
under a false name, and he was baptized at the nearest church by a
Catholic priest. A magnificent contadina was brought to light by
the doctor