In one respect only could the world fail to be wholly and perfectly contented with the Marchese Lamberto di Castelmare. At the age of fifty he was still a bachelor! Not that the continuance of the noble line of Castelmare was thereby compromised. The sister-in-law already mentioned had a son, a young man of two-and-twenty, at the time in question, who was the heir to the wealth and honours of the house, and who, it was to be hoped, would also inherit all that accumulated treasure of public esteem and respect which his uncle had been so uninterruptedly laying up. Neither could a social objection to the Marchese's bachelorhood be raised on the score of any such laxity of moral conduct as the world is wont to expect, and to tolerate with more or less of indulgence, in persons so free from special ties. Had the Marchese been an archbishop himself, instead of being merely the intimate friend of one, it could not have seemed in Ravenna more out of the question to mention his respected name in connection with any scandal or inuendo of the kind. There was not a mother in Ravenna who would not have been proud to see her daughter honoured by any such intercourse with the Marchese as might be natural between a father and his child. Proud indeed the most noble of those matrons would have been could she have supposed that any such intercourse tended towards sentiments of a more tender nature. But all hopes of this kind had been long given up in Ravenna. It was quite understood that the Marchese was not a marrying man.