This was an untenable position.  Cataneo, who only looked for a duchess, thought himself ridiculous as a husband; and, when Massimilla complained of this indifference, he calmly bid her look about her for a cavaliere servente, even offering his services to introduce to her some youths from whom to choose.  The Duchess wept; the Duke made his bow.

Massimilla looked about her at the world that crowded round her; her mother took her to the Pergola, to some ambassadors’ drawing-rooms, to the Cascine—­wherever handsome young men of fashion were to be met; she saw none to her mind, and determined to travel.  Then she lost her mother, inherited her property, assumed mourning, and made her way to Venice.  There she saw Emilio, who, as he went past her opera box, exchanged with her a flash of inquiry.

This was all.  The Venetian was thunderstruck, while a voice in the Duchess’ ear called out:  “This is he!”

Anywhere else two persons more prudent and less guileless would have studied and examined each other; but these two ignorances mingled like two masses of homogeneous matter, which, when they meet, form but one.  Massimilla was at once and thenceforth Venetian.  She bought the palazzo she had rented on the Canareggio; and then, not knowing how to invest her wealth, she had purchased Rivalta, the country-place where she was now staying.

Emilio, being introduced to the Duchess by the Signora Vulpato, waited very respectfully on the lady in her box all through the winter.  Never was love more ardent in two souls, or more bashful in its advances.  The two children were afraid of each other.  Massimilla was no coquette.  She had no second string to her bow, no secondo, no terzo, no patito.  Satisfied with a smile and a word, she admired her Venetian youth, with his pointed face, his long, thin nose, his black eyes, and noble brow; but, in spite of her artless encouragement, he never went to her house till they had spent three months in getting used to each other.

Then summer brought its Eastern sky.  The Duchess lamented having to go alone to Rivalta.  Emilio, at once happy and uneasy at the thought of being alone with her, had accompanied Massimilla to her retreat.  And now this pretty pair had been there for six months.

Massimilla, now twenty, had not sacrificed her religious principles to her passion without a struggle.  Still they had yielded, though tardily; and at this moment she would have been ready to consummate the love union for which her mother had prepared her, as Emilio sat there holding her beautiful, aristocratic hand,—­long, white, and sheeny, ending in fine, rosy nails, as if she had procured from Asia some of the henna with which the Sultan’s wives dye their fingertips.

A misfortune, of which she was unconscious, but which was torture to Emilio, kept up a singular barrier between them.  Massimilla, young as she was, had the majestic bearing which mythological tradition ascribes to Juno, the only goddess to whom it does not give a lover; for Diana, the chaste Diana, loved!  Jupiter alone could hold his own with his divine better-half, on whom many English ladies model themselves.