The judge, in giving sentence, said a condition, criminal per se, not fulfilled, did not invalidate an agreement—­a sentence abounding in wisdom, especially in this instance.

Two months before this woman had become disgusting, my friend M. Memmo, afterwards procurator, asked me to take him to her house.  In the height of the conversation, what should come but a gondola, and we saw Count Rosemberg, the ambassador from Vienna, getting out of it.  M. Memmo was thunderstruck (for a Venetian noble conversing with a foreign ambassador becomes guilty of treason to the state), and ran in hot haste from Ancilla’s room, I after him, but on the stair he met the ambassador, who, seeing his distress, burst into a laugh, and passed on.  I got directly into M. Memmo’s gondola, and we went forthwith to M. Cavalli, secretary to the State Inquisitors.  M. Memmo could have taken no better course to avoid the troublesome consequences which this fatal meeting might have had, and he was very glad that I was with him to testify to his innocence and to the harmlessness of the occurrence.

M. Cavalli received M. Memmo with a smile, and told him he did well to come to confession without wasting any time.  M. Memmo, much astonished at this reception, told him the brief history of the meeting, and the secretary replied with a grave air that he had no doubt as to the truth of his story, as the circumstances were in perfect correspondence with what he knew of the matter.

We came away extremely puzzled at the secretary’s reply, and discussed the subject for some time, but then we came to the conclusion that M. Cavalli could have had no positive knowledge of the matter before we came, and that he only spoke as he did from the instinct of an Inquisitor, who likes it to be understood that nothing is hid from him for a moment.

After the death of Ancilla, Mr. Murray remained without a titular mistress, but, fluttering about like a butterfly, he had, one after another, the prettiest girls in Venice.  This good-natured Epicurean set out for Constantinople two years later, and was for twenty years the ambassador of the Court of St. James at the Sublime Porte.  He returned to Venice in 1778 with the intention of ending his days there, far from affairs of state, but he died in the lazaretto eight days before the completion of his quarantine.

At play fortune continued to favour me; my commerce with M——­ M——­ could not be discovered now that I was my own waterman; and the nuns who were in the secret were too deeply involved not to keep it.  I led them a merry life, but I foresaw that as soon as M. de Bernis decided to let M——­ M——­ know that he would not return to Venice, he would recall his people, and we should then have the casino no longer.  I knew, besides, that when the rough season came on it would be impossible for me by myself to continue our voyages.