The reader knows, also, that what took place in the interval between the night of the reception at the Palazzo Castelmare and the morning of the first day in Lent was not calculated, as might have been supposed, to assist in bringing the mind of the Marchese to a final determination to that effect. The terrible degree to which his jealousy and anger had been excited on the night of the ball at the Circolo by Ludovico and Bianca will also not have been forgotten. The conduct which had awakened that jealousy was, in a great measure, if not entirely, innocent on the part of both the offenders, as the reader will also, no doubt, remember. The similarity of the costume adopted by the Marchesino and Bianca was entirely accidental. And this, trifling as the circumstance may seem, had contributed very materially to arouse the Marchese's wrath and jealous agony. Bianca, perhaps, under the circumstances, ought not to have danced as frequently as she did with the Marchesino. She at least knew that the Marchese Lamberto had already conceived the most torturing jealousy of his nephew. Ludovico, on his part, was of course utterly unconscious that he was giving his uncle the remotest cause for umbrage by his attentions to the successful Diva. Then came the little tete-a-tete supper--tete-a-tete by accident rather than by design, as the reader may remember; and the officious and spiteful eavesdropping and tell-tale denunciation by the angry poet. Nevertheless, and despite of all these circumstances and of the temper of mind in which he quitted the ball-room that night, it is certain that the Marchese did, on the morning of the following Ash Wednesday, send for his lawyer and announce to him formally his intention to make the Signorina Bianca Lalli his wife. We have seen all the agonies of irresolution and indecision--all the alternating swayings of his mind, as passion or prudence predominated at the moment. He seemed utterly unable to bring himself, save fitfully, to the final adoption of either line of conduct. And yet, at the moment when his jealousy most furiously boiled over, he decided on taking the first overt step towards the accomplishment of the deed. Was it possibly that he was urged irresistibly forwards by the fear that if he did not at once make the prize he so eagerly coveted irrevocably his own, the power to make it so might pass away from him? that, after all, his nephew might have found the goddess as irresistible as he had found her himself; and that she might prefer the younger to the older Marchese di Castelmare? Whatever the reflections might have been that at last drove him to take the definitive step of applying to his lawyer, we know that they were not of a pleasant kind--that the state of the Marchese's mind was anything but a happy or peaceful one during the hours that preceded his sending the message to Signor Fortini.