ts on his fingers
and to sing to her, he kisses her hand when she gives him his
cigarettes; he presents her with sugar-plums in return, which he puts
into her mouth playfully, from a box in his pocket. The rod of iron
with which he rules her never appears in company--it is a private rod,
and is always kept upstairs.

His method of recommending himself to me is entirely different. He
flatters my vanity by talking to me as seriously and sensibly as if I
was a man. Yes! I can find him out when I am away from him--I know he
flatters my vanity, when I think of him up here in my own room--and
yet, when I go downstairs, and get into his company again, he will
blind me again, and I shall be flattered again, just as if I had never
found him out at all! He can manage me as he manages his wife and
Laura, as he managed the bloodhound in the stable-yard, as he manages
Sir Percival himself, every hour in the day. "My good Percival! how I
like your rough English humour!"--"My good Percival! how I enjoy your
solid English sense!" He puts the rudest remarks Sir Percival can make
on his effeminate tastes and amusements quietly away from him in that
manner--always calling the baronet by his Christian name, smiling at
him with the calmest superiority, patting him on the shoulder, and
bearing with him benignantly, as a good-humoured father bears with a
wayward son.

The interest which I really cannot help feeling in this strangely
original man has led me to question Sir Percival about his past life.

Sir Percival either knows little, or will tell me little, about it. He
and the Count first met many years ago, at Rome, under the dangerous
circumstances to which I have alluded elsewhere. Since that time they
have been perpetually together in London, in Paris, and in Vienna--but
never in Italy again; the Count having, oddly enough, not crossed the
frontiers of his native country for years past. Perhaps he has been
made the victim of some political persecution? At all events, he seems
to be patriotically anxious not to lose sight of any of his own
countrymen who may happen to be in England. On the evening of his
arrival he asked how far we were from the nearest town, and whether we
knew of any Italian gentlemen who might happen to be settled there. He
is certainly in correspondence with people on the Continent, for his
letters have all sorts of odd stamps on them, and I saw one for him
this morning, waiting in his place at the breakf