“Ta!—­ta!—­ta!” said Bianca, repeating his own phrase, with a merry laugh in her eyes, and shaking her rich auburn curls at him.  “It seems impossible, utterly incredible!  But I am very glad if it is so,—­very glad.  There is nothing so intolerable to me as the young lads who come buzzing about one circumstanced as I am, and whom it is as difficult to drive away as it is to drive away flies in summer.  There is no trusting to them; they would compromise a poor girl as soon as look at her, if she was fool enough to let them.  And I have had lessons in the necessity of caution, Signor Marchese.  I have been cruelly treated,—­very cruelly calumniated!” And Bianca, knowing, it is to be supposed, that, if it is not always the case that “Beauty’s tear is lovelier than her smile,” as the poet says, yet that it is a phase of beauty often more potent over a male heart than the sunniest smile, raised a corner of her daintily-embroidered handkerchief to her eyes.

The Marchese was an old man of the world,—­as the cynical phrase goes,—­and of what a world?—­an old Italian Marchese of the beginning of the nineteenth century,—­a period when, if crime was less rife than in former and stronger ages, morality was never at a lower ebb.  He was a man whose musical tastes had made him conversant with the Divas of the stage, and familiar with the interior aspects of Italian theatrical life;—­one, too, whom circumstances had caused to become specially well acquainted with the antecedent history of this particular Diva now stretched on the sofa before him.  Yet none the less for all this did “beauty’s tear,” enhanced by beauty’s laced pocket-handkerchief, exercise on him its usual glamour.

Calumniated!—­that lovely creature of matchless purity before him,—­ matchless purity! so white was her throat; so round and slender her waist; so daintily snowy her muslin drapery.  Calumny!  Of course it was calumny.  And how he could have poignarded the calumniators, and taken the poor, fluttering, persecuted Diva to his bosom.  The desire to execute that latter portion of retributive and poetical justice was making itself felt stronger and stronger within him every minute, as he sat beside the sofa exposed to the full force of the magnetic poison-current which was intoxicating him.

“Signora—­” he said, putting his hand out to take hers, which she readily gave him.  His own hand shook, and he paused in his speech, overcome for a moment by a sort of dizziness and a sudden rush of the blood to his brow and eyes,—­a veritable electric shock caused by the contact of her hand with his.

“Signora,” he continued, recovering himself, “no such slander—­no such insults will follow you here; none such shall follow you here.  Lamberto di Castelmare can, at least in Ravenna, promise you that much.  Nor if they did follow you, would such stories here be believed”