ange your frock first, won't you, dear?" cried Lucia. It
was certainly not desirable that Emilia should present herself to the
Count in the garments she was then wearing.

"Yes, of course. Will you come with me to Andrea?"

"No. Send for me, presently--as soon as it occurs to you that I 've
just come back from Rome, you know, and should be so happy to hear of
your reconciliation."

Half an hour later,--for the change of costume had to be radical, since
there is all the difference in the world between a travelling-dress and
an easy, negligent, yet elegant, toilette suggestive of home and the
fireside, and certainly not of wanderings,--the Count of Fieramondi got
his shock of surprise in the shape of an inquiry whether he were at
leisure to receive a visit from the Countess.

Yet his surprise, great as it was at a result at once so prosperous and
so speedy, did not prevent him from drawing the obvious inference. His
thoughts had already been occupied with Captain Dieppe. It was now
half-past ten; he had waited an hour for dinner, and then eaten it
alone in some disquietude; as time went on he became seriously uneasy,
and had considered the despatch of a search expedition. If his friend
did not return in half an hour, he had declared, he himself would go
and look for him; and he had requested that he should be informed the
moment the Captain put in an appearance. But, alas! what is
friendship--even friendship reinforced by gratitude--beside love? As
the poets have often remarked, in language not here to be attained, its
power is insignificant, and its claims go to the wall. On fire with
the emotions excited by the Countess's message, the Count forgot both
Dieppe and all that he owed to Dieppe's intercession; the matter went
clean out of his head for the moment. He leapt up, pushed away the
poem on which he had been trying to concentrate his mind, and cried
eagerly:

"I 'm at the Countess's disposal. I 'll wait on her at once."

"The Countess is already on her way here," was the servant's answer.

The first transports of joy are perhaps better left in a sacred
privacy. Indeed the Count was not for much explanation, or for many
words. What need was there? The Countess acquiesced in his view with
remarkable alacrity; the fewer words there were, and especially,
perhaps, the fewer explanations, the easier and more gracious was her
part. She had thought the matter over, there in the solitude to which
her A