“True enough,” said John.  “But what would you have?  Some of us are born to folly, as the sparks fly upward.  You see, there’s a mighty difference between love and love.  There’s the love which is affection, there’s the love which is cupboard-love, and there’s the love which is just simply love-love and nothing else.  The first, as you have truly observed, has its roots in consanguinity or association, the second in a lively hope of future comfits, and either is sufficiently explicable.  But the third has its roots apparently in mere haphazard and causelessness, and isn’t explicable by any means whatsoever, and yet is far and away the violentest of the three.  It falls as the lightning from the clouds, and strikes whom it will.  Though I mix my metaphors fearlessly, like a man, I trust, with your feminine intuition, you follow me?”

“No,” said Annunziata, without compunction, her eyes on the distance.  “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Thank Heaven you don’t, pray Heaven you never may,” said her inconsequential friend.  “For love-love is a plague.  You meet a person, for example, in a garden.  You know nothing whatever about her, not even her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt.  You meet her not more than half a dozen times all told.  And suddenly one morning you wake up to discover that she has become to you the person of first importance in the world.  She is practically a total stranger to you, she’s of a different nationality, a different rank, yet she’s infinitely the most precious and important person in the world.  When you’re absent from her you can do nothing but think of her, gloating with throes of aromatic pain over the memory of your last meeting with her, longing with soul-hunger for your next.  The merest flutter of her gown, modulation of her voice, glance of her eye, will throw your heart into a palpitation.  You look in the direction of the house that she inhabits, and you feel the emotions of a Peri looking at the gate of Eden.  And it gives you the strangest sort of strange joy to talk about her, though of course you take pains to talk about her in veiled terms, obliquely, so that your listener shan’t guess whom you are talking about.  In short, she is the be-all and the end-all of your existence,—­and you don’t even know her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt.”

He lolled back at ease on the marble bench, and twirled his yellow-red moustaches, fancy free.

“But you do know her name,” said Annunziata, simply, in her deepest voice, holding him with a gaze, lucent and serious, that seemed almost reproachful.  “Her name is Maria Dolores.”

The thing was tolerably unexpected.  What wonder if it put my hero out of countenance?  His attitude grew rigid, his pink skin three shades pinker; his blue eyes stared at her, startled.  So for a second; then he relaxed, and laughed, laughed long and heartily, perhaps a little despitefully too, at his own expense. ...  But he must try, if he might, to repair the mischief.