e smoke of his
cigar through his fair moustachios. At last I left him even more
disgusted with his cunning cold-bloodedness than with the affair
itself, and I did not see him till the noon of the next day, when he
entered my room with a letter in his hand which he told me necessitated
his immediate departure, and as it was too late for the mail, he
requested me to lend him my little vehicle. There was nothing I was
more glad to do, not indeed that I laid much stress upon the letter,
but rather believed that it was my own eloquence that had induced him
to leave us, and to break off that luckless love-affair in good time.
And so I let him have my apprentice, as I myself had no time to drive
him to Rome, and we parted the best of friends.

"It was his intention, he told me, to travel to Greece in order to
visit Lord Byron's grave, and he promised to write to me as soon as he
got there. The rogue! He thought as little of Greece as I of a journey
to the moon. But what would you have? A mighty spell was on him, and
held him down with a hundred meshes in the Evil One's net, so that he
could look me, his best friend, in the face and tell me so confounded a
lie as this!

"That evening I went to bed with the consciousness of having done my
duty, and saved two human lives. Nay I was even planning a lyric on the
subject, which would have been by no means one of my worst, though a
convincing proof that poets are no prophets. For would you believe it,
on the following afternoon my lad returned home with the vehicle, and
the first thing he did after taking the horse to the stable and feeding
him, was to ask me if Signor Gustavo had told me they were to take a
stranger with them, for that about two miles from the village, where
the evergreen oak stands near the old tomb, this stranger had beckoned
to them, and then jumped so quickly into the conveyance, that he,
Carlino, never got a good look at his features. But in spite of that
alacrity, and of the manly attire,--which by the way belonged to Signor
Gustavo's wardrobe,--he was ready to take his oath that this stranger
was no other than Erminia.

"I will not detain you by describing the effect this discovery had on
me. I bound the youth down most solemnly to hold his peace about it.
But what could that avail! The very next day there was not an old woman
who entered my shop for a penny-worth of anything who did not inform me
that Erminia had gone off to Rome with the captain, and had