“What a man you are, Ugo!  How you turn defeat into victory!  Is it all really true?  Do you think we can do it?”

“If I were to die this instant,” Del Ferice asseverated, solemnly raising his hand, “it is all perfectly true, so help me God!”

He hoped, for many reasons, that he was not perjuring himself.

“What shall we do, then?” asked Madame Mayer.

“Let them marry first, and then we shall be sure of humiliating them both,” he answered.  Unconsciously he repeated the very determination which Giovanni had formed against him the night before.  “Meanwhile, you and I can consult the lawyers and see how this thing can best be accomplished quickly and surely,” he added.

“You will have to send for the innkeeper—­”

“I will go and see him.  It will not be hard to persuade him to claim his lawful rights.”

Del Ferice remained some time in conversation with Donna Tullia.  The magnitude of the scheme fascinated her, and instead of thinking of breaking her promise to Ugo as she had intended doing, she so far fell under his influence as to name the wedding-day,—­Easter Monday, they agreed, would exactly suit them and their plans.  Indeed the idea of refusing to fulfil her engagement had been but the result of a transitory fit of anger; if she had had any fear of making a misalliance in marrying Del Ferice, the way in which the world received the news of the engagement removed all such apprehension from her mind.  Del Ferice was already treated with increased respect—­the very servants began to call him “Eccellenza,” a distinction to which he neither had, nor could ever have, any kind of claim, but which pleased Donna Tullia’s vain soul.  The position which Ugo had obtained for himself by an assiduous attention to the social claims and prejudices of social lights and oracles, was suddenly assured to him, and rendered tenfold more brilliant by the news of his alliance with Donna Tullia.  He excited no jealousies either; for Donna Tullia’s peculiarities were of a kind which seemed to have interfered from the first with her matrimonial projects.  As a young girl, a relation of the Saracinesca, whom she now so bitterly hated, she should have been regarded as marriageable by any of the young Roman nobles, from Valdarno down.  But she had only a small dowry, and she was said to be extravagant—­two objections then not so easily overcome as now.  Moreover, she was considered to be somewhat flighty; and the social jury decided that when she was married, she would be excellent company, but would make a very poor wife.  Almost before they had finished discussing her, however, she had found a husband, in the shape of the wealthy foreign contractor, Mayer, who wanted a wife from a good Roman house, and cared not at all for money.  She treated him very well, but was speedily delivered from all her cares by his untimely death.  Then, of all her fellow-citizens, none was found save the eccentric old Saracinesca, who believed that she would