There was a French secretary of legation for Berne, a most pleasant _convive_; and the Austrian general was equally amusing. Some of his anecdotes of the campaign of 1805 were admirable: by the way, he felt dreadfully shocked at his own confession that he remembered Wagram. The Countess Giordani came late. We were returning from our ramble among rocks and cliffs when she appeared. I did not wish to be presented; I preferred rather the part of observing her, which acquaintance would have prevented. But old Lady B---- did not give me the choice: she took my arm, and, after a little tour through the company, came directly in front of the Countess, saying, with a bluntness all her own,-- “Madame la Comtesse, let me present a friend whose long residence in your country gives him almost the claim of a countryman:--M, Templeton.” If I was not unmoved by the suddenness of this introduction--appealing as it did, to me at least, to old memories--the Countess was composure itself: a faint smile in acknowledgment of the speech, a gentle expression of easy satisfaction on meeting one who had visited her country, were all that even my prying curiosity could detect. “What part of Sicily have you seen?” said she to me. “My friend Lady B----,” said I, “has made me a greater traveller than I can pretend to be: I have been no further south than Naples.” “Oh! I am not Neapolitan,” said she, hastily, and with an air like disappointment. I watched her closely as she spoke, and at once said to myself, “No! this is not, this cannot be, Caroline Graham.” We conversed but little during dinner. She evidently did not speak French willingly, and my Italian had been too long in rust for fluency. Of English she shewed not the least knowledge. There were stories told in her hearing, at some of which to avoid laughter would have been scarcely possible, and still she never smiled once. If I wanted any additional evidence that she was not of English origin, chance presented one, as she was referred to by the Russian for the name of a certain Sicilian family where a “vendetta” had been preserved for two entire centuries; and the Countess replied, with a slight blush, “The Marquis of Bianconetti--my uncle.”