Good Heavens, I am quoting poetry! what will you think of me, to have gone back to the Wertherian and Tennysonian days so far as to repeat a triplet of Longfellow's? No man quotes _those_ poets after his salad days, except in a moment of weakness. Caramba! why _has_ one any weaknesses at all? we ought not to have any; we live in an atmosphere that would kill them all if they were not as obstinate and indestructible as all other weeds whose seeds will linger and peer up and spoil the ground, let one root them out ever so! I owed you an apology for that lapse into Longfellow, and I have made it. Am I to go on with this story?" He laughed as he spoke, and his laugh was by no means heartfelt. I told him to go on, and he lighted another Manilla and obeyed me, while the Arno murmured on its way, and the dusky, sultry clouds brooded nearer the earth, and the lights were lit in the distant windows of the palace of the Marchese Acqua d'Oro, that fairest of Florentines, who rouges so indiscriminately and flirts her fan so inimitably, to one of whose balls we were going that night. He settled himself back in his chair, with his face darkened again by the shadow cast on it from the pillar of the balcony; and took his cigar out of his mouth. "She looked incongruous in that bare and gloomy room, out of place with it, and out of keeping with the old woman--a French peasant-woman, weather-beaten and bronzed, such as you see any day by the score riding to market or sitting knitting at their cottage-doors. It was impossible that the girl could be either daughter or grand-daughter, or any relation at all to her. In that room she looked more as one of these myrtles might do, set down in the stifling gloomy horrors of a London street than anything else, save that in certain traces about the chamber, as I told you, there were relics of a faded grandeur which harmonized better with her. I can see her now, as she stood there with a strange foreign grace, an indescribable patrician delicacy mingled with extreme youthfulness and naïveté, like an old picture in costume, like one of Raphael's child-angels in face--poor little Florelle! "'You would stay till the storm is over, monsieur? you are welcome to shelter if you will,' she said, coming forward to me timidly yet frankly. 'Cazot tells me you are a stranger, and our mountain storms are dangerous if you have no guide.'