with a vivid clearness that would never more be obliterated, it would be unjust to judge his conduct as that of a man in the possession of his senses.  He was, he said, mad—­mad!—­and carried away by a hurricane of passions altogether beyond his power to control.  He had not formed any distinct intention of following his nephew and La Bianca to the Pineta till he reached his own house.  He had happened to approach the Palazzo from the back, through the stable-yard; and had there found old Niccolo, the groom, up.  Then the idea of waylaying the pair in the forest had occurred to him.  He had ordered a horse to be saddled; and had told the groom to let no one know that he had left the palace.  He then went up to his room, dismissed his valet, and locked the door, as the servant had related to Signor Fortini.  Then descending to the stables, by one of those private doors and stairs so frequently to be found in old Italian palaces, and generally contrived to communicate with the principal sleeping chamber of the dwelling, he mounted his horse, and rode furiously to the Pineta, quitting the city, not by the Porta Nueva, but by the next gate towards the south.  He must have reached the forest before Ludovico and Bianca had left the city.  He put his steaming horse into the abandoned hovel of a watcher of the cattle on the marshes; and then skulked about the edge of the wood in the vicinity of the road which enters it from the city.  All this time he had, as he again and again declared in the long and repetitive document in the lawyer’s hands, no formed intention of any sort in his mind.  All he knew was that he was mad, and suffering torments worse than any imagination had ever depicted the tortures of the damned; the pulses were beating, and the blood was rushing in his ears and in his eyes, he wrote, in such sort that all sounds seem to him one universal buzzing, and all objects vague and uncertain, and tinged with the colour of blood.

And, in this condition, he waited and waited till almost a wild hope began to creep upon him that the Conte Leandro had lied to him.

Suddenly he saw them coming towards the edge of the wood.

With difficulty, he stood upright, resting the front of his shoulder and his forehead against the trunk of a tree, from behind which he glared out, while his eyes were blasted by what he saw.

Judging more sanely than the poor Marchese was able to judge, and putting together all the circumstances and conduct and declarations of the other parties, we may probably conclude, that though he saw enough to madden the heart and brain of a man whose mind had already been warped and distorted by jealousy, he did not see aught that could have been deemed to menace the future happiness of Paolina.  No doubt La Bianca, despite her declared intention to make the Marchese Lamberto a good and true wife, had he married her, would have preferred to become Marchese di Castelmare by a marriage with his nephew.  No doubt she had