many other details Orsino wrote to Maria Consuelo, pouring out his confidence with the assurance of a man who asks nothing but sympathy and is sure of receiving that in overflowing measure.  He no longer waited for her answers, as the crucial moment approached, but wrote freely from day to day, as he felt inclined.  There was little which he did not tell her in the dozen or fifteen letters he penned in the course of the month.  Like many reticent men who have never taken up a pen except for ordinary correspondence or for the routine work of a business requiring accuracy, and who all at once begin to write the history of their daily lives for the perusal of one trusted person, Orsino felt as though he had found a new means of expression and abandoned himself willingly to the comparative pleasure of complete confidence.  Like all such men, too, he unconsciously exhibited the chief fault of his character in his long, diary-like letters.  That fault was his vanity.  Had he been describing a great success he could and would have concealed it better; in writing of his own successive errors and disappointments he showed by the excessive blame he cast upon himself, how deeply that vanity of his was wounded.  It is possible that Maria Consuelo discovered this.  But she made no profession of analysis, and while appearing outwardly far colder than Orsino, she seemed much more disposed than he to yield to unexpected impulses when she felt their influence.  And Orsino was quite unconscious that he might be exhibiting the defects of his moral nature to eyes keener than his own.

He wrote constantly therefore, with the utmost freedom, and in the moments while he was writing he enjoyed a faint illusion of increased safety, as though he were retarding the events of the future by describing minutely those of the past.  More than once again Maria Consuelo answered him, and always in the same strain, doing her best, apparently, to give him hope and to reconcile him with himself.  However much he might condemn his own lack of foresight, she said, no man who did his best according to his best judgment, and who acted honourably, was to be blamed for the result, though it might involve the ruin of thousands.  That was her chief argument and it comforted him, and seemed to relieve him from a small part of the responsibility which weighed so heavily upon his shoulders, a burden now grown so heavy that the least lightening of it made him feel comparatively free until called upon to face facts again and fight with realities.

But events would not be retarded, and Orsino’s own good qualities tended to hasten them, as they had to a great extent been the cause of his embarrassment ever since the success of his first attempt, in making him valuable as a slave to be kept from escaping at all risks.  The system upon which the business was conducted was admirable.  It had been good from the beginning and Orsino had improved it to a degree very uncommon in Rome.  He had mastered