He crossed the road and walked towards the western boundary of the Regent’s Park.  I kept on my own side of the way, a little behind him, and walked in that direction also.

Marian had prepared me for his high stature, his monstrous corpulence, and his ostentatious mourning garments, but not for the horrible freshness and cheerfulness and vitality of the man.  He carried his sixty years as if they had been fewer than forty.  He sauntered along, wearing his hat a little on one side, with a light jaunty step, swinging his big stick, humming to himself, looking up from time to time at the houses and gardens on either side of him with superb, smiling patronage.  If a stranger had been told that the whole neighbourhood belonged to him, that stranger would not have been surprised to hear it.  He never looked back, he paid no apparent attention to me, no apparent attention to any one who passed him on his own side of the road, except now and then, when he smiled and smirked, with an easy paternal good humour, at the nursery-maids and the children whom he met.  In this way he led me on, till we reached a colony of shops outside the western terraces of the Park.

Here he stopped at a pastrycook’s, went in (probably to give an order), and came out again immediately with a tart in his hand.  An Italian was grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable little shrivelled monkey was sitting on the instrument.  The Count stopped, bit a piece for himself out of the tart, and gravely handed the rest to the monkey.  “My poor little man!” he said, with grotesque tenderness, “you look hungry.  In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!” The organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent stranger.  The Count shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and passed on.

We reached the streets and the better class of shops between the New Road and Oxford Street.  The Count stopped again and entered a small optician’s shop, with an inscription in the window announcing that repairs were neatly executed inside.  He came out again with an opera-glass in his hand, walked a few paces on, and stopped to look at a bill of the opera placed outside a music-seller’s shop.  He read the bill attentively, considered a moment, and then hailed an empty cab as it passed him.  “Opera Box-office,” he said to the man, and was driven away.

I crossed the road, and looked at the bill in my turn.  The performance announced was Lucrezia Borgia, and it was to take place that evening.  The opera-glass in the Count’s hand, his careful reading of the bill, and his direction to the cabman, all suggested that he proposed making one of the audience.  I had the means of getting an admission for myself and a friend to the pit by applying to one of the scene-painters attached to the theatre, with whom I had been well acquainted in past times.  There was a chance at least that the Count might be easily visible among the audience to me and to any one with me, and in this case I had the means of ascertaining whether Pesca knew his countryman or not that very night.