“All that has to do with matters of material existence I leave to my wife,” replied Gambara.  “She will decide as to what we may accept without a blush from so thorough a gentleman as you seem to be.  For my part,—­and it is long since I have allowed myself to indulge such full confidences,—­I must now ask you to allow me to leave you.  I see a melody beckoning to me, dancing and floating before me, bare and quivering, like a girl entreating her lover for her clothes which he has hidden.  Good-night.  I must go and dress my mistress.  My wife I leave with you.”

He hurried away, as a man who blames himself for the loss of valuable time; and Marianna, somewhat embarrassed, prepared to follow him.

Andrea dared not detain her.

Giardini came to the rescue.

“But you heard, signora,” said he.  “Your husband has left you to settle some little matters with the Signor Conte.”

Marianna sat down again, but without raising her eyes to Andrea, who hesitated before speaking.

“And will not Signor Gambara’s confidence entitle me to his wife’s?” he said in agitated tones.  “Can the fair Marianna refuse to tell me the story of her life?”

“My life!” said Marianna.  “It is the life of the ivy.  If you wish to know the story of my heart, you must suppose me equally destitute of pride and of modesty if you can ask me to tell it after what you have just heard.”

“Of whom, then, can I ask it?” cried the Count, in whom passion was blinding his wits.

“Of yourself,” replied Marianna.  “Either you understand me by this time, or you never will.  Try to ask yourself.”

“I will, but you must listen.  And this hand, which I am holding, is to lie in mine as long as my narrative is truthful.”

“I am listening,” said Marianna.

“A woman’s life begins with her first passion,” said Andrea.  “And my dear Marianna began to live only on the day when she first saw Paolo Gambara.  She needed some deep passion to feed upon, and, above all, some interesting weakness to shelter and uphold.  The beautiful woman’s nature with which she is endowed is perhaps not so truly passion as maternal love.

“You sigh, Marianna?  I have touched one of the aching wounds in your heart.  It was a noble part for you to play, so young as you were, —­that of protectress to a noble but wandering intellect.  You said to yourself:  ’Paolo will be my genius; I shall be his common sense; between us we shall be that almost divine being called an angel,—­the sublime creature that enjoys and understands, reason never stifling love.’

“And then, in the first impetus of youth, you heard the thousand voices of nature which the poet longed to reproduce.  Enthusiasm clutched you when Paolo spread before you the treasures of poetry, while seeking to embody them in the sublime but restricted language of music; you admired him when delirious rapture carried him up and away from you, for you liked to believe that all this devious energy would at last come down and alight as love.  But you knew not the tyrannous and jealous despotism of the ideal over the minds that fall in love with it.  Gambara, before meeting you, had given himself over to the haughty and overbearing mistress, with whom you have struggled for him to this day.