me, 'You are not over wise, Fra Angelico,' and continued polishing up the locks and barrel of his rifle, and puffing the blue smoke of his cigar through his fair moustachios. At last I left him even more disgusted with his cunning cold-bloodedness than with the affair itself, and I did not see him till the noon of the next day, when he entered my room with a letter in his hand which he told me necessitated his immediate departure, and as it was too late for the mail, he requested me to lend him my little vehicle. There was nothing I was more glad to do, not indeed that I laid much stress upon the letter, but rather believed that it was my own eloquence that had induced him to leave us, and to break off that luckless love-affair in good time. And so I let him have my apprentice, as I myself had no time to drive him to Rome, and we parted the best of friends. "It was his intention, he told me, to travel to Greece in order to visit Lord Byron's grave, and he promised to write to me as soon as he got there. The rogue! He thought as little of Greece as I of a journey to the moon. But what would you have? A mighty spell was on him, and held him down with a hundred meshes in the Evil One's net, so that he could look me, his best friend, in the face and tell me so confounded a lie as this! "That evening I went to bed with the consciousness of having done my duty, and saved two human lives. Nay I was even planning a lyric on the subject, which would have been by no means one of my worst, though a convincing proof that poets are no prophets. For would you believe it, on the following afternoon my lad returned home with the vehicle, and the first thing he did after taking the horse to the stable and feeding him, was to ask me if Signor Gustavo had told me they were to take a stranger with them, for that about two miles from the village, where the evergreen oak stands near the old tomb, this stranger had beckoned to them, and then jumped so quickly into the conveyance, that he, Carlino, never got a good look at his features. But in spite of that alacrity, and of the manly attire,--which by the way belonged to Signor Gustavo's wardrobe,--he was ready to take his oath that this stranger was no other than Erminia. "I will not detain you by describing the effect this discovery had on me. I bound the youth down most solemnly to hold his peace about it. But what could that avail! The very next day there was not an old woman who entered my shop for a penny-worth of anything who did not inform me that Erminia had gone off to Rome with the captain, and had sent a message to her mother to the effect that she should not indeed return, but would never forget that she was her daughter. And, moreover, she had left behind for her sister Maddalena whom she must have taken into her confidence, all her clothes and other effects, and a bag of money--probably from the Captain--so that their mother might want for nothing.