"I never alluded to it to any one," continued the Marchioness. "Guatamara and Saint-Jeu, though such intimate friends, are ignorant of it. I would rather have any one think ever so badly of me, than reveal to them the cruel misfortune of my sweet Lucrezia----" How noble she looked as she spoke! "But you, Augustus, you," and she smiled upon me till I grew as dizzy as after my first taste of milk-punch, "I have not the courage to let _you_ go off with any bad impression of me. I have known you a very little while, it is true--but a few hours, indeed--yet there are affinities of heart and soul which overstep the bounds of time, and, laughing at the chill ties of ordinary custom, make strangers dearer than old friends----" The room revolved round me, the lights danced up and down, my heart beat like Thor's hammer, and my pulse went as fast as a favorite saving the distance. _She_ speaking so to me! My senses whirled round and round like fifty thousand witches on a Walpurgis Night, and down I went on my knees before my magnificent idol, raving away I couldn't tell you what now--the essence of everything I'd ever read, from Ovid to Alexander Smith. It must have been something frightful to hear, though Heaven knows I meant it earnestly enough. Suddenly I was pulled up with a jerk, as one throws an unbroken colt back on his haunches in the middle of his first start. _I thought I heard a laugh._ She started up too. "Hush! another time! We may be overheard." And drawing her dress from my hands, which grasped it as agonisingly as a cockney grasps his saddle-bow, holding on for dear life over the Burton or Tedworth country, she stooped kindly over me, and floated away before _I_ was recovered from the exquisite delirium of my ecstatic trance. She loved me! This superb creature loved me! There was not a doubt of it; and how I got back to the barracks that night in my heavenly state of mind I could never have told. All I know is, that Grand and I never spoke a word, by tacit consent, all the way back; that I felt a fiendish delight when I saw his proud triumphant air, and thought how little he guessed, poor fellow!----And that Dream of One Fair Woman was as superior in rapture to the "Dream of Fair Women" as Tokay to the "Fine Fruity Port" that results from damsons and a decoction of sloes! The next day there was a grand affair in Malta to receive some foreign Prince, whose name I do not remember now, who called on us _en route_ to England. Of course all the troops turned out, and there was an inspection of us, and a grand luncheon and dinner, and ball, and all that sort of thing, which a month before I should have considered prime fun, but which now, as it kept me out of my paradise, I thought the most miserable bore that could possibly have chanced.