“I suppose Captain Van Dorne has been too busy to call,” I observed, carelessly, as I prepared to commence my letter, “and Mrs. Raymond too happy, probably, in getting safe to shore and her lover, to think of me.”

“They have both inquired for you,” said Mrs. Clayton, as she arranged pen, ink, and paper, before me, with her usual precision, while a grim, sardonic smile lingered about her features; “several have called, but none have been admitted.”

“Who have called, Mrs. Clayton?  Give me the cards immediately.  I must, must know,” I rejoined, eagerly, pausing with extended hand to receive them.

“Oh, there were no cards, and such as want to see you can come again.  There, now! write away, and never trouble your mind about strange people.  Have you sufficient light?”

And, as she spoke, she touched a cord which set at right angles with the lower one the upper inside shutter of another window as she had adjusted the first.

I wrote, two hasty notes, one on further consideration to Captain Wentworth himself, who might, after all, be at that very time in that same hotel—­“Quien sabe?” as Favraud used to say with his significant shrug, which no Frenchman ever excelled or Spaniard equalled (albeit they shrug severally).

My spirits rose with every word I wrote, and, when I got up from my chair after sealing and directing my letters, a new and subtle energy seemed to have infused itself through my frame.  “There, I have finished, Mrs. Clayton,” I said, putting aside the implements I had been using.  “Now go, if you please, and bring to me the proprietor of this hotel.  I will give him my letters myself, since I have other business to transact with him,” and I laid my watch and chain on the table before me, ready for his hand, not having lost sight of my early resolution.  “But, stay—­before you go, be good enough to open the lower shutters and throw up the windows.  Cool as the weather is in this climate, I stifle for air, and this close atmosphere, laden with fragrance, grows oppressive.  Who sent these flowers, by-the-by, Mrs. Clayton? or do they belong to the magnificence of this idealized hotel?” She made no reply to any thing I had been saying.

By this time, however, she had lowered the upper sashes of the windows about a foot, and the fresh air of morning was pouring in, curling the paper on the centre table and dispersing the noisome fragrance of the flowers, in which I detected the morbid supremacy of the tuberose and jasmine.

“I want to see the streets, the people,” I said, approaching one of the windows; “this artistic light is not at all the thing I need.  I have no picture to paint, not even my own face;” and, finding her unmoved, I undertook to do the requisite work myself.

The sashes were shut away below by inside shutters, which resisted all my efforts to stir them.  After a moment’s inspection, I perceived that they were secured by iron screws of great strength and size; not, in short, meant to be moved or opened at all.  Again I essayed to shake them convulsively one after the other—­as you may sometimes see a tiger, made desperate by confinement, grapple with the inexorable bars of his cage, though certain of failure and defeat.