“Papa! oh, how can you say that, how can you say such things--and then leave me as if I were a baby, knowing nothing!” “My dear,” he said (with the sound of a smile in his voice, she thought to herself), “you are very hard to please. Must not I say that you are sensible? I think it is the highest compliment I can pay you.” “O papa!” Disappointment, and mortification, and the keen sense of being fooled, which is so miserable to the young, took her very breath away. The exasperation with which we discover that not only is no explanation, no confidence to be given us, but the very occasion for it ignored, and our anxiety baffled by a smile--a mortification to which women are so often subject--flooded her being. She had hard ado not to burst into angry tears, not to betray the sense of cruelty and injustice which overwhelmed her; but who could have seen any injustice or cruelty in the gentleness of his tone, his soft reply? Frances subdued herself as best she could in her dark corner of the loggia, glad at least that he could not see the spasm that passed over her, the acute misery and irritation of her spirit. It would be strange if he did not divine something of what was going on within her: but he took no notice. He began in the same tone, as if one theme was quite as important as the other, to remark upon the unusual heaviness of the clouds which hid the moon. “If we were in England, I should say there was a storm brewing,” he said. “Even here, I think we shall have some rain. Don’t you feel that little creep in the air, something sinister, as if there was a bad angel about? And Domenico, I see, has brought the lamp. I vote we go in.” “Are there any bad angels?” she cried, to give her impatience vent. He had risen up, and stood swaying indolently from one foot to the other. “Bad angels? Oh yes,” he said; “abundance; very different from devils, who are honest--like the fiends in the pictures, unmistakable. The others, you know, deceive. Don’t you remember?-- ‘How there looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright; And how he knew it was a fiend, That miserable knight.’” He turned and went into the _salone_, repeating these words in an undertone to himself. But there was in his face none of the bitterness or horror with which they must have been said by one who had ever in his own person made that discovery. He was quite calm, meditative, marking with a slight intonation and movement of his head the cadence of the poetry.