"Listen to me a moment. I hardly know how to warn you, and yet I must. I cannot sit quietly by and see you and your young friends being deceived as so many have been before you. Do not come here again---do not----" "Figlia mia! are you not afraid of the night-air?" said the Prince of Orangia Magnolia, just behind us. His words were kind, but there was a nasty glitter in his eyes. Lucrezia answered him in passionate Italian--of which I had no knowledge--with such fire in her eyes, such haughty gesticulation, and such a torrent of words, that I really began to think, pretty soft little dear as she looked, that she must positively be a trifle out of her mind, her silence before, and her queer speech to me, seemed such odd behavior for a young lady in such high society. She was turning to me again when Little Grand came out into the veranda, looking flushed, proud, and self-complaisant, as such a winner and slayer of women would do. My hand clenched on the jasmine, I thirsted to spring on him as he stood there with his provoking, self-contented smile, and his confounded coxcombical air, and his cursed fair curls--_my_ hair was dust-colored and as rebellious as porcupine-quills--and wash out in his blood or mine----A touch of a soft hand thrilled through my every nerve and fibre: the Marchioness was there, and signed me to her. Lucrezia, Little Grand, and all the rest of the universe vanished from my mind at the lightning of that angel smile and the rustle of that moire-antique dress. She beckoned me to her into the empty drawing-room. "Augustus" (I never thought my name could sound so sweet before), "tell me, what was my niece Lucrezia saying to you just now?" Now I had a sad habit of telling the truth; it was an out-of-the-world custom taught me, among other old-fashioned things, at home, though I soon found how inconvenient a _bêtise_ modern society considers it; and I blurted the truth out here, not distinctly or gracefully, though, as Little Grand would have done, for I was in that state of exaltation ordinarily expressed as not knowing whether one is standing in one's Wellingtons or not. The Marchioness sighed. "Ah, did she say that? Poor dear girl! She dislikes me so much, it is quite an hallucination, and yet, O Augustus, I have been to her like an elder sister, like a mother. Imagine how it grieves me," and the Marchioness shed some tears--pearls of price, thought I, worthy to drop from angel eyes--"it is a bitter sorrow to me, but, poor darling! she is not responsible." She touched her veiny temple significantly as she spoke, and I understood, and felt tremendously shocked at it, that the young, fair Italian girl was a fierce and cruel maniac, who had the heart (oh! most extraordinary madness did it seem to me; if _I_ had lost my senses I could never have harmed _her_!) to hate, absolutely hate, the noblest, tenderest, most beautiful of women!