d August he ventured to
cross the Alps for six weeks on a visit to his married daughter. He
told me her name. It was that of a very aristocratic family. She had
a castle--in Bohemia, I think. This is as near as I ever came to
ascertaining his nationality. His own name, strangely enough, he never
mentioned. Perhaps he thought I had seen it on the published list. Truth
to say, I never looked. At any rate, he was a good European--he spoke
four languages to my certain knowledge--and a man of fortune. Not
of great fortune evidently and appropriately. I imagine that to be
extremely rich would have appeared to him improper, outre--too blatant
altogether. And obviously, too, the fortune was not of his making. The
making of a fortune cannot be achieved without some roughness. It is
a matter of temperament. His nature was too kindly for strife. In the
course of conversation he mentioned his estate quite by the way, in
reference to that painful and alarming rheumatic affection. One year,
staying incautiously beyond the Alps as late as the middle of September,
he had been laid up for three months in that lonely country house
with no one but his valet and the caretaking couple to attend to him.
Because, as he expressed it, he "kept no establishment there." He
had only gone for a couple of days to confer with his land agent. He
promised himself never to be so imprudent in the future. The first weeks
of September would find him on the shores of his beloved gulf.

Sometimes in travelling one comes upon such lonely men, whose only
business is to wait for the unavoidable. Deaths and marriages have made
a solitude round them, and one really cannot blame their endeavours to
make the waiting as easy as possible. As he remarked to me, "At my time
of life freedom from physical pain is a very important matter."

It must not be imagined that he was a wearisome hypochondriac. He was
really much too well-bred to be a nuisance. He had an eye for the
small weaknesses of humanity. But it was a good-natured eye. He made
a restful, easy, pleasant companion for the hours between dinner and
bedtime. We spent three evenings together, and then I had to leave
Naples in a hurry to look after a friend who had fallen seriously ill
in Taormina. Having nothing to do, Il Conde came to see me off at the
station. I was somewhat upset, and his idleness was always ready to take
a kindly form. He was by no means an indolent man.

He went along the train peering int