by me, who does
not like me, whose prejudices are all against me, she it is who offers
me her little hand to help me. It is a lovely little hand, though she is
not a beauty----"

"My wife is very well," said Sir Tom, with a certain hauteur and
abruptness, such as in all their lengthened conversations he had never
shown before.

The Contessa gave him a look in which there was much of that feminine
contempt at which men laugh as one of the pretences of women. "I am
going to be good to her as she is to me," she said. "The Carnival will
be short this year, and in England you have no Carnival. I will find
myself a little house for the season. I will not too much impose upon
that angel. There, now, is something good for you to relieve your mind.
I can read you, _mon ami_, like a book. You are fond of me--oh yes!--but
not too long; not too much. I can read you like a book."

"Too long, too much, are not in my vocabulary," said Sir Tom; "have they
a meaning? not certainly that has any connection with a certain charming
Contessina. If that lady has a fault, which I doubt, it is that she
gives too little of her gracious countenance to her friends."

"She does not come down to breakfast," said the Contessa, with her soft
laugh, which in itself was a work of art. "She is not so foolish as to
put herself in competition with the lilies and the roses, the English
flowers. Poverina! she keeps herself for the afternoon which is
charitable, and the light of the lamps which is flattering. But she
remembers other days--alas! in which she was not afraid of the sun
himself, not even of the mid-day, nor of the dawn when it comes in above
the lamps. There was a certain _bal costume_ in Florence, a year when
many English came to the Populino palace. But why do I talk of that? You
will not remember----"

There was something apparently in the recollection that touched Sir Tom.
His eye softened. An unaccustomed colour came to his middle-aged cheek.
"I! not remember? I remember every hour, every moment," he said, and
then their voices sank lower, and a murmur of reminiscences, one filling
up another, ensued between the pair. Their tone softened, there were
broken phrases, exclamations, a rapid interchange which was far too
indistinct to be audible. Lucy sat by her table and worked, and was
vaguely conscious of it all. She had said to herself that she would take
no heed any more, that the poor Contessa was too open-hearted, too
generous to ha