This arrangement suited me exactly.  I noticed that my future brother-in-law admired a little gold case on my night-table, so I begged him to accept it as a souvenir of our friendship.  He embraced me, and put it in his pocket, saying he would keep it till his dying day.

“You mean till the day when it advances your suit with a lady,” said I.

I was sure of having a good supper with Irene, so I resolved to take no dinner.  As the count had gone to St. Angelo, fifteen miles from Milan, the day before, I felt obliged to wait on the countess in her room, to beg her to excuse my presence at dinner.  She was very polite, and told me by no means to trouble myself.  I suspected that she was trying to impose on me, but I wanted her to think she was doing so successfully.  In my character of dupe I told her that in Lent I would make amends for the dissipation which prevented me paying my court to her.  “Happily,” I added, “Lent is not far off.”

“I hope it will be so,” said the deceitful woman with an enchanting smile, of which only a woman with poison in her heart is capable.  With these words she took a pinch of snuff, and offered me her box.

“But what is this, my dear countess, it isn’t snuff?”

“No,” she replied, “it makes the nose bleed, and is an excellent thing for the head-ache.”

I was sorry that I had taken it, but said with a laugh, that I had not got a head-ache, and did not like my nose to bleed.

“It won’t bleed much,” said she, with a smile, “and it is really beneficial.”

As she spoke, we both began to sneeze, and I should have felt very angry if I had not seen her smile.

Knowing something about these sneezing powders, I did not think we should bleed, but I was mistaken.  Directly after, I felt a drop of blood, and she took a silver basin from her night-table.

“Come here,” said she, “I am beginning to bleed too.”

There we were, bleeding into the same basin, facing each other in the most ridiculous position.  After about thirty drops had fallen from each of us, the bleeding ceased.  She was laughing all the time, and I thought the best thing I could do was to imitate her example.  We washed ourselves in fair water in another basin.

“This admixture of our blood,” said she, still smiling, “will create a sweet sympathy between us, which will only end with the death of one or the other”

I could make no sense of this, but the reader will soon see that the wretched woman did not mean our friendship to last very long.  I asked her to give me some of the powder, but she refused; and on my enquiring the name of it, she replied that she did not know, as a lady friend had given it to her.

I was a good deal puzzled by the effects of this powder, never having heard of the like before, and as soon as I left the countess I went to an apothecary to enquire about it, but Mr. Drench was no wiser than I. He certainly said that euphorbia sometimes produced bleeding of the nose, but it was not a case of sometimes but always.  This small adventure made me think seriously.  The lady was Spanish, and she must hate me; and these two facts gave an importance to our blood-letting which it would not otherwise possess.