The first advantage he obtained was to hear himself spoken of as a nightmare; and that naturally:  prompted him to prick up his ears to hear more.  But when he had thus learned the whole secret of the projected expedition, it struck him, as well worth considering, whether there might not be found in this the means of making his tormentor pay him for some of the annoyances he had suffered at his hands.

So! the Marchese Ludovico, who ought to be paying his addresses to the Contessa Violante in the sight of all Ravenna—­the Contessa Violante Marliani was great niece of the Cardinal Legate, between whom and the Marchese Ludovico their respective families had projected an alliance—­was, instead of that, going off on a partie fine with the notorious Bianca Lalli!  A tete-a-tete in the Pineta!  Mighty fine, indeed!  So sure, too, that nobody in the world would find them out on Ash Wednesday morning!  And he is to be at her door at six o’clock in the morning!  Very good!  Capitally well arranged—­ were it not that Leandro Lombardoni may perhaps think fit to put a spoke in the wheel.

A little further consideration of the manner in which such spoke might be most effectually supplied, decided the angry and malicious poet—­(poets, like women, will become malicious when scorned)—­to seek out the Marchese Lamberto, whom he thought he should probably find in the card-room.  For though the Marchese was no great card-player, and never touched a card in his own house, he was wont, at the Circolo, on such occasions as the present, to cast in his lot with those who so consoled themselves for the years that made the ball-room no longer their proper territory.

But the Conte Leandro did not find the Marchese among the card-players.

The events of the evening had already thrown him back again into a very miserable state of mind, from which the Marchese had been suffering such torments as the jealous only know, during all the latter half of the Carnival.  It was strange that such a man as the Marchese Lamberto—­it would have seemed passing strange to any of those his fellow-citizens who had known him, thoroughly as they supposed, all his life; very strange that such a man, so calm, so judicious, so little liable to the gusts of passion of any sort; a man, the even tenor of whose well-regulated life had ever been such as to expose him rather to the charge of almost apathetic placidity of temper, should thus suddenly, in the full meridian time of his mature years, become subject to such violent oscillations of passion; to such buffetings by storms, blowing now from one and now from the opposite quarter of the sky.  But no length of prosperous navigation in the quiet waters of a land-locked harbour will give evidence of the vessel’s fitness to encounter the storms and the waves of the open sea.  The storm-wind of a strong passion had, all at once for the first time, blown in upon the sheltered harbour in which that placid life had been led.