“No, sir, not even if the horse belonged to you, for the postillion preceded me.  You know a great many things; do you happen to know the posting regulations?  Besides, I was in a great hurry because I had promised a pretty woman to breakfast with her, and such engagements, as you are well aware, cannot be broken.”

Master de la Haye looked angry at the rather caustic irony with which I had sprinkled the dialogue; but he was still more vexed when, taking some gold out of my pocket, I returned to him the sum he had lent me in Vienna.  A man never argues well except when his purse is well filled; then his spirits are pitched in a high key, unless he should happen to be stupefied by some passion raging in his soul.

M. de Bragadin thought I was quite right to shew myself at the opera without a mask.

The moment I made my appearance in the pit everybody seemed quite astonished, and I was overwhelmed with compliments, sincere or not.  After the first ballet I went to the card-room, and in four deals I won five hundred sequins.  Starving, and almost dead for want of sleep, I returned to my friends to boast of my victory.  My friend Bavois was there, and he seized the opportunity to borrow from me fifty sequins, which he never returned; true, I never asked him for them.

My thoughts being constantly absorbed in my dear C——­ C——­, I spent the whole of the next day in having my likeness painted in miniature by a skilful Piedmontese, who had come for the Fair of Padua, and who in after times made a great deal of money in Venice.  When he had completed my portrait he painted for me a beautiful St. Catherine of the same size, and a clever Venetian jeweller made the ring, the bezel of which shewed only the sainted virgin; but a blue spot, hardly visible on the white enamel which surrounded it, corresponded with the secret spring which brought out my portrait, and the change was obtained by pressing on the blue spot with the point of a pin.

On the following Friday, as we were rising from the dinner-table, a letter was handed to me.  It was with great surprise that I recognized the writing of P——­ C——.  He asked me to pay him a visit at the “Star Hotel,” where he would give me some interesting information.  Thinking that he might have something to say concerning his sister, I went to him at once.

I found him with Madame C——­, and after congratulating him upon his release from prison I asked him for the news he had to communicate.

“I am certain,” he said, “that my sister is in a convent, and I shall be able to tell you the name of it when I return to Venice.”

“You will oblige me,” I answered, pretending not to know anything.

But his news had only been a pretext to make me come to him, and his eagerness to communicate it had a very different object in view than the gratification of my curiosity.

“I have sold,” he said to me, “my privileged contract for three years for a sum of fifteen thousand florins, and the man with whom I have made the bargain took me out of prison by giving security for me, and advanced me six thousand florins in four letters of exchange.”