there in the
moonlight, and addressed him with a collected voice. "Tonelli," she
said, "I think you have treated your oldest and best friends very
cruelly. Was it not enough that you should take yourself from us, but
you must also forbid our hearts to follow you even in sympathy and good
wishes? I had almost thought to say adieu forever to-night; but," she
continued, with a breaking utterance, and passing tenderly to the
familiar form of address, "I cannot part so with thee. Thou hast been
too like a son to me, too like a brother to my poor Clarice. Maybe thou
no longer lovest us, yet I think thou wilt not disdain this gift for thy
wife. Take it, Tonelli, if not for our sake, perhaps then for the sake
of sorrows that in times past we have shared together in this unhappy
Venice."

Here the signora ended perforce the speech, which had been long for
her, and the Paronsina burst into a passion of weeping,--not more at her
mamma's words than out of self-pity and from the national sensibility.

Tonelli took the chain, and reverently kissed it and the hands that gave
it. He had a helpless sense of the injustice the signora's words and the
Paronsina's tears did him; he knew that they put him with feminine
excess further in the wrong than even his own weakness had; but he tried
to express nothing of this,--it was but part of the miserable maze in
which his life was involved. With what courage he might he owned his
error, but protested his faithful friendship, and poured out all his
troubles,--his love for Carlotta, his regret for them, his shame and
remorse for himself. They forgave him, and there was everything in their
words and will to restore their old friendship, and keep it; and when
the gate with a loud clang closed upon Tonelli, going from them, they
all felt that it had irrevocably perished.

I do not say that there was not always a decent and affectionate bearing
on the part of the Paronsina and her mother towards Tonelli and his
wife; I acknowledge that it was but too careful and faultless a
tenderness, ever conscious of its own fragility. Far more natural was
the satisfaction they took in the delayed fruitfulness of Tonelli's
marriage, and then in the fact that his child was a girl, and not a boy.
It was but human that they should doubt his happiness, and that the
signora should always say, when hard pressed with questions upon the
matter: "Yes, Tonelli is married; but if it were to do again, I think he
would do