“To be sure—­to be sure.  And if you will take my advice, Signora, you will go home, and give yourself no trouble at all about the young lady.  Lord bless us! what though ’tis Lenten-tide?  Young folks will be young, Signora Orsola.  They’ll come home safe enough.  And maybe I might as well say nothing to the Signor Marchesino about your coming here, you know.  When folks have come to that time of life, Signora, as brings sense with it, they mostly learn that least said is soonest mended,” said the old porter, with a nod of deep meaning.

And Signora Orsola was fain to take the porter’s advice, so far as returning to her home went.  But it was not equally easy to give herself no further trouble about Paolina.  It might be as the porter said; and if she could have been sure that it was so the old lady would have been perfectly easy.  But it was not at all like Paolina to have planned such an escapade without telling her old friend anything about it.  She felt sure that when Paolina said she was going to St. Apollinare to look after the preparations for her copying there, she had no other or further intention in her thoughts.  To be sure there was the possibility that Ludovico might have known her purpose of going thither, and might have planned to accompany her on her expedition, without having apprized her of any such scheme.  And it might not be unlikely that in such a case they had been tempted to spend a few hours in the Pineta.  And with these possibilities Signora Steno was obliged to tranquillize herself as she best might.

She returned home not without some hope that she might find that Paolina had returned during her absence; but such was not the case—­ Paolina was still absent.  And though it was now some eight or nine hours from the time she had left home, old Orsola had nothing for it but to wait for tidings of her as patiently as she could.

CHAPTER VI

Gigia’s Opinion

The aged monk of St. Apollinare, after watching Paolina as she departed from the Basilica, and took the path towards the forest, returned into the church to his devotions at the altar of the saint, as has been said.  But he found himself unable to concentrate his attention as usual, not on the meaning of the words of the litanies he uttered,—­that, it may be imagined, few such worshippers do, or even attempt to do,—­but on such devotional thoughts as, on other occasions, constituted his mental attitude during the hours he spent before the altar.

He could not prevent his mind from straying to thoughts of the girl who had just left him; of certain long-sleeping recollections of his own past, which her name had recalled to him; of her very manifest emotion at the sight of the couple in the bagarino, and the too easy interpretation of the meaning of that emotion; and specially of her implied intention of taking the same route that they had taken.