w petulant as a wayward child.
She might descend whilst he was absent. Indeed, she might require some
slight service that lay, perchance, in his power to render her. What
an opportunity would he not lose were he abroad? She might even depart
before we returned; and than that no greater calamity could just
then befall him. No, he would not stir a foot from the inn. A fig for
exercise! to the devil with health! who sought an appetite? Not he. He
wished for no appetite--could contrive no base and vulgar appetite for
food, whilst his soul, he swore, was being consumed by the overwhelming,
all-effacing appetite to behold her.

Such meandering fools are most of us at nineteen, when the heart is
young--a flawless mirror ready to hold the image of the first fair maid
that looks into it through our eyes, and as ready--Heaven knows!--to
relinquish it when the substance is withdrawn.

But I, who was not nineteen, and the mirror of whose heart--to pursue my
metaphor--was dulled, warped, and cracked with much ill-usage, grew sick
of the boy's enthusiasm and the monotony of a conversation which I could
divert into no other channel from that upon which it had been started
by a little slip of a girl with hair of gold and sapphire eyes--I use
Andrea's words. And so I rose, and bidding him take root in the tavern,
if so it pleased his fancy, I left him there.

Wrapped in my cloak, for the air was raw and damp, I strode aimlessly
along, revolving in my mind what had befallen at the Connetable that
morning, and speculating upon the issue that this quaint affair might
have. In matters of love, or rather, of matrimony--which is not quite
the same thing--opposition is common enough. But the opposers
are usually members of either of the interested families. Now the
families--that is to say, the heads of the families--being agreed and
even anxious to bring about the union of Yvonne de Canaples and Andrea
de Mancini, it was something new to have a cabal of persons who, from
motives of principle--as St. Auban had it--should oppose the alliance so
relentlessly as to even resort to violence if no other means occurred
to them. It seemed vastly probable that Andrea would be disposed of by
a knife in the back, and more than probable that a like fate would be
reserved for me, since I had constituted myself his guardian angel. For
my own part, however, I had a pronounced distaste to ending my days in
so unostentatious a fashion. I had also a notion th