in their own minds for liberty and enjoyment when one or the other of them should become the Countess Oliva and fool the old black-spectacled husband to her heart’s content.  Needless to say their plans were not destined to be fulfilled, though I rather enjoyed studying the many devices they employed to fascinate me.  What pretty ogling glances I received!—­what whispered admiration of my “beautiful white hair! so distingue”—­what tricks of manner, alternating from grave to gay, from rippling mirth to witching languor!  Many an evening I sat at ease on board my yacht, watching with a satirical inward amusement, one, perhaps two or three of these fair schemers ransacking their youthful brains for new methods to entrap the old millionaire, as they thought me, into the matrimonial net.  I used to see their eyes--sparkling with light in the sunshine—­grow liquid and dreamy in the mellow radiance of the October moon, and turn upon me with a vague wistfulness most lovely to behold, and—­most admirably feigned!  I could lay my hand on a bare round white arm and not be repulsed—­I could hold little clinging fingers in my own as long as I liked without giving offense such are some of the privileges of wealth!

In all the parties of pleasure I formed, and these were many—­my wife and Ferrari were included as a matter of course.  At first Nina demurred, with some plaintive excuse concerning her “recent terrible bereavement,” but I easily persuaded her out of this.  I even told some ladies I knew to visit her and add their entreaties to mine, as I said, with the benignant air of an elderly man, that it was not good for one so young to waste her time and injure her health by useless grieving.  She saw the force of this, I must admit, with admirable readiness, and speedily yielded to the united invitations she received, though always with a well-acted reluctance, and saying that she did so merely “because the Count Oliva was such an old friend of the family and knew my poor dear husband as a child.”

On Ferrari I heaped all manner of benefits.  Certain debts of his contracted at play I paid privately to surprise him—­his gratitude was extreme.  I humored him in many of his small extravagances—­I played with his follies as an angler plays the fish at the end of his line, and I succeeded in winning his confidence.  Not that I ever could surprise him into a confession of his guilty amour—­but he kept me well informed as to what he was pleased to call “the progress of his attachment,” and supplied me with many small details which, while they fired my blood and brain to wrath, steadied me more surely in my plan of vengeance.  Little did he dream in whom he was trusting!—­little did he know into whose hands he was playing!  Sometimes a kind of awful astonishment would come over me as I listened to his trivial talk, and heard him make plans for a future that was never to be.  He seemed so certain of his happiness—­so absolutely sure that nothing could or would intervene to mar it.  Traitor as he was he was unable to foresee punishment—­materialist to the heart’s core, he had no knowledge of the divine law of compensation.  Now and then a dangerous impulse stirred me—­a desire to say to him point-blank: