little low laugh, at which she was frightened when she heard it, and became suddenly as solemn and serious as an old picture. Then she returned shyly to the corner of the window, peeping, though she ought to have known that it was impossible he could see her. The figure opposite was in the act of passing on; it gave a long look back as it went slowly away, lingering as if reluctant to be out of her neighbourhood. Rita drew back this time with a kind of awe. She knew he would have thought no more of climbing the garden wall, however high it had been--if there had been a garden wall and a balcony, and she out upon it discoursing to the moon--than Romeo did. “But there is the difference,” Rita said to herself; “he may be in love with me, but I am not in love with him. I would never stand out there and sigh Romeo, Romeo. No,” she went on, with a little shriek of a laugh, “not Romeo. Oh, Isaac, Isaac, wherefore art thou Isaac? That is too ridiculous; it is all too ridiculous. I don’t wonder at what Benedetta says, that the English are half-mad.” And then she sat a long time in the dark, and thought, and thought. It was all very new and very strange. It roused her lively faculties with the pleasure of a novel sensation. She had taken her proposals of marriage with sedate contempt, and announced authoritatively to her father on each occasion that she had no intention of ever marrying, and that she liked him much better than any other man in the world, an assurance which the poor Vice-Consul took great comfort in, though it was not possible that any man in his senses could accept it as a matter of serious faith. But now Rita could not deny to herself that this strange new bewildering sensation was a pleasant one. Her former suitors would no doubt have gladly adopted it had it been thought that such an easy mode of love-making would have been permitted; but in their cases it would not have moved the foolish girl. To see somebody standing silent on the other side of the street, doing nothing to call her attention, not wishing to be noticed, doing it only for a little comfort to himself, was entirely different. That was the English way, she thought with awe. To be able to give love up for the sake of honour, and yet to have it so much at heart as to be driven to come and look at the house in which the beloved object lived, standing about alone in a cold night--Rita’s whole heart was penetrated by the sincerity, the modesty, the self-restraint, yet self-abandonment, which were English, only English, nothing else. It was not in the least a cold night: Harry outside felt it to be warm and genial: but there was a cool little night-breeze lifting the curtains, and she strove to call it cold to heighten the effect. This was how the Vice-Consul had mismanaged matters. He was not a happy man as he read his despatches; but he had no idea of the mischief which was going on under cover of the night. CHAPTER XIII. A LOVER’S ORDEAL.