A suite of reception rooms, decorated like the rooms of a palace, and the strains of the Hungarian band floating softly on an air heavy with the rich perfume of banks of rare exotics. Distinguished-looking men and beautiful women, in the picturesque garb of all ages and nations, gliding over the smooth floor. Powdered footmen noiselessly passing backwards and forwards over the thick carpets of a succession of satin-draped ante-rooms. Flowers, light, music, and perfume; fair faces and soft words. That night seems like a confused dream of all these to me, save for one brief minute. One brief minute, when the giver of all these, the flattered recipient of endless compliments from noble lips, came face to face with the image of the man on whose misery all these things were built up, came face to face with him, in the very uniform, and with the same fiercely reproachful gaze, which he had worn more than twenty years ago. "It was the heat--the excitement--the overwork!" his sympathising guests declared, as their host was carried from their midst in a dead faint, with his face like the face of a corpse. But I knew better, and I laughed as I strode into my room at the hotel, and flung myself into an easy chair. Something on the mantelpiece attracted my attention, and I sprang up with a quick cry, and caught hold of a thin foreign envelope. I tore it open with trembling fingers, and read:--"My dear son. Come to me at Palermo, if you will.--Yours affectionately, H. D----" It had come at last, then! Thank God! Thank God! CHAPTER XXXI MY FATHER AND I "My father! my father!" We stood on the slope of a wild heath-covered hill, alone, with no human being or sign of habitation in sight. Before us towered a dreary, lofty range of bare mountains--on one side was a fearful precipice, and below us on the other the blue sea. We had met on the road, my father and I! With both hands clasping his, I looked into his face. Alas, how changed it was! Thin and shrunken, with hollow eyes and furrowed brow, he looked to me what he was, a wreck. "You have been ill," I cried, with a lump in my throat and the tears springing into my eyes; "where have you been? Why did you not send for me?" He pointed to a loose piece of rock a few yards off. "Let us sit down, and I will tell you everything," he said, wearily; "I am tired." We sat down, and I waited eagerly for him to begin. There was a patch of brilliantly coloured wild-flowers at our feet which filled the air all round with a dreamy, intoxicating odour. It was a perfume which has lingered with me even to this day.