“With La Bianca?”

“Yes! with La Bianca.”

“I don’t know.  I don’t think that I should in earnest.  I know in my inmost heart, my own love, that you love me truly and entirely; I feel it, I am sure of it.  But all the same, I should rather that you did not travel from here to Rome alone with La Lalli.”

“That means that, to a certain degree, you are jealous, little one.  Do you think I should be uneasy if you were called on to travel under the escort, for example, of our friend the Conte Leandro?”

“The Conte Leandro!” cried Paolina, laughing, “I am sure you ought to be uneasy at the bare thought of such a thing, for you know how terrible it would be to me.  But is it quite the same thing, amico mio?  La Lalli is indisputably a very beautiful woman; and the Conte Leandro is—­the Conte Leandro.  But it is not that she is beautiful.  I don’t know what it is.  There is something about her—­ecco, I should not the least mind now your travelling to the world’s end, or being occupied in any other way, with the Contessa Violante.”

“She is not a beautiful woman, certainly.”

“She is, at all events, fifty times more pleasing-looking, as well as more attractive in every way, than the Conte Leandro.  But that is not what makes the difference.  I take it, the difference is, that one feels that the Contessa Violante is good, and that nobody would get anything but good from her.  I have got quite to love her myself.”

“And yet you see, Paolina mia, somehow or other it came to pass that I could not love her, when I was bid to do so; and, in the place of doing that, I went and loved somebody else instead.  How is that to be accounted for, eh?”

“I am sure that is more than I can guess, Ludovico.”

“One thing is clear—­and a very good thing it is—­that Violante has no more desire to marry me than I have to marry her.  As soon as ever Carnival is over, my own darling, I mean to speak definitively to my uncle, and tell him, in the first place, that he must give up all notion of a marriage between Violante and me.”

“As soon as Carnival is over.  Why, that will be the day after to-morrow,”—­said Paolina, flushing all over.

“Exactly so; the day after to-morrow.  But I mean only to tell him, in the first instance, that I cannot make the marriage he would have me.  Then, when that is settled—­and some little time allowed for him to get over his mortification, il povero zio—­will come the announcement of the marriage I can make.  I have quite fixed with myself to do it the day after to-morrow.  But—­I don’t know what to make of my uncle.  He is not in the least like himself.  I am afraid he must be ill.  I fully expected that I should have to fight all through Carnival against constant exhortations to pay my court to the Contessa.  But he has never spoken to me a word on the subject.”

“Perhaps he has discovered that the lady likes the proposal no better than you do,” suggested Paolina, with a wise look of child-like gravity up at her lover’s face.