“As for the election, I’m sure if I was at home I should think it very good fun.  Out here I am extremely doubtful whether we ought to do such things as you and Lord M——­ suggest.  A duke shouldn’t interfere in elections.  Anyway, I’m sure it’s good for my character to consider it a little—­though I quite admit you may lose the election.

“The Grand Duke is a horrid wretch, and if he wasn’t a grand duke you’d be the first to cut him.  I had to spend a whole dinner-time last year in teaching him his proper place.  It was very humiliating, and not at all amusing.  You can have a men’s dinner for him.  That’s all he’s fit for.

“And as for the babies, Mrs. Robson sends me a telegram every morning.  I can’t make out that they have had a finger-ache since I went away, and I am sure mothers are entirely superfluous.  All the same, I think about them a great deal, especially at night.  Last night I tried to think about their education—­if only I wasn’t such a sleepy creature!  But, at any rate, I never in my life tried to think about it at home.  So that’s so much to the good.

“Indeed, I’ll come back to you soon, you poor, forsaken, old thing!  But Julie has no one in the world, and I feel like a Newfoundland dog who has pulled some one out of the water.  The water was deep; and the life’s only just coming back; and the dog’s not much good.  But he sits there, for company, till the doctor comes, and that’s just what I’m doing.

“I know you don’t approve of the notions I have in my head now.  But that’s because you don’t understand.  Why don’t you come out and join us?  Then you’d like Julie as much as I do; everything would be quite simple; and I shouldn’t be in the least jealous.

“Dr. Meredith is coming here, probably to-night, and Jacob should arrive to-morrow on his way to Venice, where poor Chudleigh and his boy are.”

* * * * *

The breva, or fair-weather wind, from the north was blowing freshly yet softly down the lake.  The afternoon sun was burning on Bellaggio, on the long terrace of the Melzi villa, on the white mist of fruit-blossom that lay lightly on the green slopes above San Giovanni.

Suddenly the Duchess and the boatman left the common topics of every day by which the Duchess was trying to improve her Italian—­such as the proposed enlargement of the Bellevue Hotel, the new villas that were springing up, the gardens of the Villa Carlotta, and so forth.  Evelyn had carelessly asked the old man whether he had been in any of the fighting of ’59, and in an instant, under her eyes, he became another being.  Out rolled a torrent of speech; the oars lay idly on the water; and through the man’s gnarled and wrinkled face there blazed a high and illumining passion.  Novara and its beaten king, in ’49; the ten years of waiting, when a whole people bode its time, in a gay, grim silence; the grudging victory of Magenta; the fivefold struggle