“I will be there at six or thereabouts.  Now we will go back to the ball-room; but don’t dance till you have not a leg left to stand on.  We must have a good long stroll in the Pineta.”

“Lascia fare a me!  I dare say I shan’t dance another dance—­unless, indeed, we have one more turn together before you go.  Is there time?”

“Oh yes, for that plenty of time.  If you are not afraid of tiring yourself, one more last dance by all means.”

So giving her his arm, the Marchesino led his beautiful and fascinating companion back to the ballroom, where the music was again making the most of the time with another waltz.

CHAPTER II

Apollo Vindex

The Conte Leandro Lombardoni had not passed a pleasant Carnival.  Reconciled, as he had recently professed himself to be—­after some one of the frequent misfortunes that happened to his intercourse with them—­with the fair sex, he had begun his Carnival by attempting to make his merit acceptable in the eyes of La Lalli; and had failed to obtain any recognition from her, even as a poet, to say nothing of his pretensions as a Don Juan.  To a certain limited degree, it had been forced upon his perception, that he had been making an ass of himself; and the appreciation of that fact by the other young men among whom he lived had been indicated with that coarse brutality, as the poet said to himself, which was the outcome of minds not “softened by the study of the ingenuous arts,” as his own was.  He had been consistently snubbed and flouted, he and his poetry, and his love-making, and his carefully prepared Carnival costumes.

The result was, that at the ball on that last night of the Carnival, the Conte Leandro was not in charity with all men, and, indeed, hardly with any man.  He was feeling very sore, and would fain have avenged his pain by making any one else feel equally sore, if he had it in his power to do so.

He was especially angry with Ludovico di Castelmare.  Had he not chaffed him unmercifully about the verses he had sent to La Bianca?  Was it not, to all appearance, due to him that the Diva had never condescended to cast a glance on either him or his poetry?  Had he not called him Aesop, when it was plain to all the world that he represented Apollo?  And now this night, again, he had taken the opportunity of turning him into ridicule in the presence of La Bianca; and he and she had spoken of the possibility of their being troubled with his company as of a nightmare.  For the painful fact was that their uncomplimentary expressions had been heard by the poet; who, when he had left Ludovico and Bianca in the little supper-room together, had retreated no further than just to the other side of a curtain, which hung, Italian fashion, by the side of the open door.  Finding that there was nobody there—­for the little buffet was at the end of the entire suite of rooms, and all those who were not either in the ball-room, or in the card-room, were at that moment in the principal supper-room—­it had seemed well to the Conte Leandro, in his dudgeon and spite against all the world, to ensconce himself quietly behind the curtain, and hear what use Ludovico and Bianca would make of their tete-a-tete.