“Well, well.  All these matters had better be submitted to the lady herself.  I think, Signor Ercole, that I will say good-morning now.  You are going to the theatre, and I am waited for at the palazzo.”

And the Marchese did return to the palazzo, though nobody was specially waiting for him there.  On the contrary, he told the servant in the hall to admit nobody, and when he reached his library, he shut the door and bolted it.  And then he threw himself into an easy chair to think.

The first thing that his thinking made clear and certain to him was that something had happened, or was happening to him, which had never happened to him before,—­something respecting the exact nature of which all his previous experience afforded him no light.

In love!  He had never been in love; but he knew, with some tolerable accuracy, what was generally understood by the phrase.  He had read the poets, who describe the passion under sufficiently various phases; and he had heard plenty of lovers’ talk among a people who are not wont to suffer, or to exult, or to be happy in silence.  Was he in love with this woman?  Did he, in his heart, love her—­in his heart, as he was there in the solitude of his own room, at liberty and at leisure to examine his heart upon the subject.  A heavy frown settled on the Marchese Lamberto’s brow, and an unpleasant change came over his face, as he proceeded with the task of asking his heart this question.  There rose up feelings and promptings within him, which almost drove him to the fierce assertion to himself that he hated this woman, who was thus occupying his thoughts against his will.

What had become of all that warm chivalry of feeling that had urged him, with all perfect earnestness of sincerity, to declare that no breath of calumny or insult should come near her, beneath the aegis that he could and would throw over her?  Where was it gone?  All clean gone.  He knew, with tolerable accuracy, the story of the former life of this woman.  They were facts which he knew,—­certainly knew.  But they had all vanished from his mind,—­had been as though they were not,—­while he had sat there by her sofa, looking at her and listening to her,—­had all vanished, even as the ardent chivalry, which had then been caused by some sorcery to spring up in his mind, had vanished now.

It was passing strange.

That he was very sorely tempted—­as he had never before in his life been, tempted—­to make love to this actress,—­as it is called,—­to make love to her after the fashion, not so much of those poetical descriptions which have been referred to, as after the fashion of those prosaic settings-forth of the passion, which were familiar enough to his ears, was clearly recognizable by him.  He knew very certainly that he desired that.