My niece was delightful, and treated me as if I had no right to feel any resentment for her having preferred her own bed to mine.  I was pleased with her behaviour, for now that my head was cool I felt that she would have degraded herself if she had acted otherwise.  My vanity was not even wounded, which is so often the case under similar circumstances.  Self-love and prejudice prevent a woman yielding till she has been assidiously courted, whereas I had asked her to share my bed in an off-hand manner, as if it were a mere matter of form.  However, I should not have done it unless it had been for the fumes of the champagne and the Somard, with which we had washed down the delicious supper mine host had supplied us with.  She had been flattered by the bishop’s invitation, but she did not know whether I had accepted for her as well as myself; and when I told her that we were going out to dinner together, she was wild with joy.  She made a careful toilette, looking very well for a traveller, and at noon my lord’s carriage came to fetch us.

The prelate was a tall man, two inches taller than myself; and in spite of the weight of his eighty years, he looked well and seemed quite active, though grave as became a Spanish grandee.  He received us with a politeness which was almost French, and when my niece would have kissed his hand, according to custom, he affectionately drew it back, and gave her a magnificent cross of amethysts and brilliants to kiss.  She kissed it with devotion, saying,—­

“This is what I love.”

She looked at me as she said it, and the jest (which referred to her lover La Croix or Croce) surprised me.

We sat down to dinner, and I found the bishop to be a pleasant and a learned man.  We were nine in all; four priests, and two young gentlemen of the town, who behaved to my niece with great politeness, which she received with all the manner of good society.  I noticed that the bishop, though he often spoke to her, never once looked at her face.  My lord knew what danger lurked in those bright eyes, and like a prudent greybeard he took care not to fall into the snare.  After coffee had been served, we took leave, and in four hours we left Tortona, intending to lie at Novi.

In the course of the afternoon my fair niece amused me with the wit and wisdom of her conversation.  While we were supping I led the conversation up to the bishop, and then to religion, that I might see what her principles were.  Finding her to be a good Christian, I asked her how she could allow herself to make a jest when she kissed the prelate’s cross.

“It was a mere chance,” she said.  “The equivocation was innocent because it was not premeditated, for if I had thought it over I should never have said such a thing.”

I pretended to believe her; she might possibly be sincere.  She was extremely clever, and my love for her was becoming more and more ardent, but my vanity kept my passion in check.  When she went to bed I did not kiss her, but as her bed had no screen as at Tortona, she waited until she thought I was asleep to undress herself.  We got to Genoa by noon the next day.