“He has the greatest admiration for you,” I said.  “He would have been honoured by your visit.”

She looked at me a moment sharply.  “More admiration than you.  Admit that!” Of course I protested with all the eloquence at my command, and my mysterious hostess then confessed that she had taken no fancy to me on my former visit, and that, Theobald not having returned, she believed I had poisoned his mind against her.  “It would be no kindness to the poor gentleman, I can tell you that,” she said.  “He has come to see me every evening for years.  It’s a long friendship!  No one knows him as well as I.”

“I don’t pretend to know him or to understand him,” I said.  “He’s a mystery!  Nevertheless, he seems to me a little—­” And I touched my forehead and waved my hand in the air.

Serafina glanced at her companion a moment, as if for inspiration.  He contented himself with shrugging his shoulders as he filled his glass again.  The padrona hereupon gave me a more softly insinuating smile than would have seemed likely to bloom on so candid a brow.  “It’s for that that I love him!” she said.  “The world has so little kindness for such persons.  It laughs at them, and despises them, and cheats them.  He is too good for this wicked life!  It’s his fancy that he finds a little Paradise up here in my poor apartment.  If he thinks so, how can I help it?  He has a strange belief—­really, I ought to be ashamed to tell you—­that I resemble the Blessed Virgin:  Heaven forgive me!  I let him think what he pleases, so long as it makes him happy.  He was very kind to me once, and I am not one that forgets a favour.  So I receive him every evening civilly, and ask after his health, and let him look at me on this side and that!  For that matter, I may say it without vanity, I was worth looking at once!  And he’s not always amusing, poor man!  He sits sometimes for an hour without speaking a word, or else he talks away, without stopping, on art and nature, and beauty and duty, and fifty fine things that are all so much Latin to me.  I beg you to understand that he has never said a word to me that I mightn’t decently listen to.  He may be a little cracked, but he’s one of the blessed saints.”

“Eh!” cried the man, “the blessed saints were all a little cracked!”

Serafina, I fancied, left part of her story untold; but she told enough of it to make poor Theobald’s own statement seem intensely pathetic in its exalted simplicity.  “It’s a strange fortune, certainly,” she went on, “to have such a friend as this dear man—­a friend who is less than a lover and more than a friend.”  I glanced at her companion, who preserved an impenetrable smile, twisted the end of his moustache, and disposed of a copious mouthful.  Was he less than a lover?  “But what will you have?” Serafina pursued.  “In this hard world one must not ask too many questions; one must take what comes and keep what one gets.  I have kept my good friend for twenty years, and I do hope that, at this time of day, signore, you have not come to turn him against me!”