We made it up accordingly--when Little Grand was not conceited he was a very jolly fellow--and then I gave him my whole key to the mysteries, intricacies, and charms of our Casa di Fiori. We could not chaff one another, but poor Little Grand was pitiably sore then, and for long afterwards. He, the "old bird," the cool hand, the sharp one of Ours, to have been done brown, to be the joke of the mess, the laugh of all the men, down to the weest drummer-boy! Poor Little Grand! He was too done up to swagger, too thoroughly angry with himself to swear at anybody else. He only whispered to me, "Why the dickens could she want you and me to meet our selves?" "To give us a finishing hoax, I suppose," I suggested. Little Grand drew his cap over his eyes, and hung his head down in abject humiliation. "I suppose so. What fools we have been, Simon! And, I say, I've borrowed three hundred of old Miraflores, and it's all gone up at that devilish Casa; and how I shall get it from the governor, Heaven knows, for _I_ don't." "I'm in the same pickle, Grand," I groaned. "I've given that old rascal notes of hand for two hundred pounds, and, if it don't drop from the clouds, I shall never pay it. Oh, I say, Grand, love comes deucedly expensive." "Ah!" said he, with a sympathetic shiver, "think what a pair of hunters we might have had for the money!" With which dismal and remorseful remembrance the old bird, who had been trapped like a young pigeon, swore mightily, and withdrew into humbled and disgusted silence. Next morning we heard, to our comfort--what lots of people there always are to tell us how to lock our stable-door when our solitary mare has been stolen--that, with a gentle hint from the police, the Marchioness St. Julian, with her _confrères_, had taken wing to the Ionian Isles, where, at Corfu or Cephalonia, they will re-erect the Casa di Fiori, and glide gently on again from vingt-et-un to loo, and from loo to lansquenet, under eyes as young and blinded as our own. They went without Lucrezia. Conran took her into his own hands. Any other man in the regiment would have been pretty well ridiculed at taking a bride out of the Casa di Fiori; but the statements made by the high-born Abbess of her Roman convert were so clear, and so to the girl's honor, and he had such a way of holding his own, of keeping off liberties from himself and anything belonging to him, and was, moreover, known to be of such fastidious honor, that his young wife was received as if she had been a Princess in her own right. With her respected parent Conran had a brief interview previous to his flight from Malta, in which, with a few gentle hints, he showed that worthy it would be wiser to leave his daughter unmolested for the future, and I doubt if Mr. Orangia Magnolia, _alias_ Pepe Guari, would know his own child in the joyous, graceful, daintily-dressed mistress of Conran's handsome Parisian establishment.