It might not be so easy to crush the little pink scorpion note, and liberate himself from the writer of it.  Proof?  There might be no legal evidence to show that he had ever made such a promise.  Yet, to have such an assertion made by Bianca and her father,—­to have to deny the fact, knowing it to be true!—­he, Lamberto di Castelmare!  Great God! what was before him?

Then there was that woman, the servant, too.  Might it not well be that she, too, knew the promise he had made; overheard him possibly; set to do so—­likely enough!  What was he to do?—­what was he to do?

Something he must do quickly.  The Cardinal Legate was expecting him at one o’clock, and—­would it be best to drive Bianca from his mind till afterwards?  Go to her he must in the course of the day!

Then, suddenly as a lightning-flash, he saw her before him as he had gazed on her at the theatre overnight in her white night-dress, uttering those words of passionate love—­love which she told him was all addressed to him,—­which she was pining to speak to him again.

That, then, it was in his power to have, and to have now,—­now at once.  “Ahi, ahi!” he gnashed, through his ground teeth, closing his eyes as the besieging vision postured itself in every seductive guise before the suggestions of his fancy.  Ah, God! what were Cardinals, and Crosses, and place and station, or all the world beside, to one half-hour in those arms?

Come what come might, he would see her first before going to the Cardinal.

Snatching his hat, cane, and gloves, breakfastless as he was, he hurried out of the house half mad with the passion that was consuming him, yet with enough of the old thoughts about him to turn away, on quitting his own door, from the direction of the Porta Sisi, and to seek the goal of his thoughts by the most unfrequented route he could find.

CHAPTER V

Bianca at Home

Quinto Lalli and Bianca were sitting together in the parlour of their apartments in the Strada di Porta Sisi, that same Monday morning just after the little pink note had been despatched to the Marchese.  Bianca was having her breakfast—­a small quantity of black coffee in a drinking-glass, brought, together with a roll of dry bread, from the cafe.  Old Lalli was not partaking of her repast, having previously enjoyed a similar meal, with the addition of a modicum of some horrible alcoholic mixture, called “rhume,” poured into the coffee at the cafe in the next street.

“That will bring him fast enough,” said the old man, alluding to the note which had been just despatched.  “The game is quite in your own hands, as I told you from the beginning it would be.  That postscript was a capital thought.”

The postscript in question, which, it may be remembered, had not added to the pleasure the billet had given the Marchese, had been added at the suggestion of old Lalli himself.