me with at the theatre last night.  I longed so to have sung the words I had to utter for your ears—­to your ears only:  `Amo il zeffiro, perche ad esso il tuo nome confido.’  Ah, Lamberto, if you knew how true that is.  It is often—­how often—­the singer’s duty to utter on the stage the words of passion.  But what a thing it is—­a thing I never dreamed before—­to feel them as I utter them.  The opera did not go badly, did it?  I think the success was a legitimate one.  But what is any success or any applause now to me, save yours?  I felt that I was singing to one only, as one only was in my heart and in my thoughts.  Do not let many hours pass before you come to me, my love, my lord!  For they go very slowly and heavily, these hours; and as I trace the movement of the tardy hour-hand on the clock, I grow sick with longing, and with hope deferred.  Come to me, my dearest and my best.  Your own” “Bianca”

“P.  S.—­I have mentioned our engagement to no soul save my father; of course you did not wish me to exclude him from our confidence.  He is fully worthy of it.”

The Marchese sunk down into the chair that stood before his toilet-table, with the little letter in his hand; and his hand shook, and his eyes were dizzy, and there was a buzzy ringing in his ears.  And still the perfume from the pink paper rose to his nostrils, and seemed to his fancy as though it were a poison that he had neither the power nor the will to defend himself from.

He had put the little pink note down on the table where the two other letters were, and sat looking at the three.  They were manifestly, fatally incompatible.  Either the two big letters must be thrown to the winds—­they and their contents for ever—­together with all thought of honours, high social standing, and admiring respect of the world; or the little pink note must be crushed at once and for ever, and its writer—­ah!—­made to understand, to begin with, that the Marchese di Castelmare did not know his own mind; that his offer and his plighted word were not to be trusted;

The letters lying there on the table before him, as he sat gazing at them almost without the power of anything that merited to be called thought, represented themselves to his fancy as living agencies of contrasted qualities and powers.  The two large missives from his ecclesiastical friends were creditable and useful steeds; harmless, wholesome in blood and nature, big and pacific, apt for service, and good for drawing him on to honour, success, and prosperity.  The little pink note was a scorpion with a power a thousand-fold greater, for its size—­a sharp, venomous, noxious power, stinging to the death, yet imparting with its sting a terrible, a fatal delight, an acrid fierce pleasure, which once tasted could not by any mortal strength of resolution be dashed away from the lips.

He took the sweet-scented little paper in his hand and read it through again.  And his veins seemed to run with fire as he read.  Then for the first time he saw the postscript.  It had escaped his notice before.  That old man had been informed that he had offered marriage to the girl he called his daughter and had been accepted.