'... Amongst the new arrivals here are the San Zenone. You remember my telling you of their marriage some six weeks ago. It was quite _the_ marriage of the season. They really were immensely in love with each other, but that stupid month down in the country has done its usual work. In a rainy June, too! Of course, any poor Cupid would emerge from his captivity bedraggled, dripping and disenchanted. She is really very pretty, quite lovely, indeed; but she looks fretful and dull; her handsome husband, on the contrary, is as gay as a lark which has found the door of its cage wide open one morning. There is here a great friend of his, a Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva. _She_ is very gay, too; she is always perfectly dressed, and chattering from morning to night in shrill Italian or voluble French. She is the cynosure of all eyes as she goes to swim in a rose-coloured _maillot_, with an orange and gold eastern burnous flung about her artistically. She has that wonderful Venetian colouring, which can stand a contrast and glow of colour which would simply kill any other woman. She is very tall, and magnificently made, and yet uncommonly graceful. Last night she was persuaded to dance a _salterello_ with San Zenone at the Maison Persane, and it was marvellous. They are both such handsome people, and threw such wonderful _brio_, as they would call it, into the affair. The poor, little, pretty Princess, looking as fair and as dull as a primrose in a shower, sat looking on dismally. Stupid little thing!--as if _that_ would do her any good! A few days ago Lord Hampshire arrived off here in his yacht. He was present at the _salterello_, and as I saw him out in the gardens afterwards with the neglected one, sitting beside her in the moonlight, I presume he was offering her sympathy and consolation. He is a heavy young fellow, but exceedingly good-humoured and kind-hearted. _He_ would have been in Heaven in the wet June at Coombe Bysset--but she refused him, silly little thing! I am quite angry with her; she has had her own way and she won't make the best of that. I met her, and her rejected admirer, riding together this morning towards Villerville, while the beautiful Prince was splashing about in the water with his Venetian friend. I see a great many eventual complications ahead. Well, they will all be the fault of that Rainy June!' DON GESUALDO DON GESUALDO I It was a day in June.