Mr. Bonamy, the Vice-Consul, was a man who ought to have filled a very different position. He ought to have been Consul-General and a person of importance. He had been long in the service, and he had done good work, and there was nothing against him. But there are some people who never will “get on,” whatever may be the circumstances in their favour, just as there are some whom all the adverse circumstances in the world will not keep down. He was rash, as may have been seen by his reception of Harry, and he was one of those men upon whom experience has no power, who never learn--who having been deceived twenty times are just as ready to believe and be imposed upon the twenty-first. His own goodness and rectitude were such that he had kept his position fairly, and his talent and fine faculties had not been without acknowledgment; but he had not “got on.” There was another circumstance too which kept him in his present position. His history had been briefly told by Paolo, and was one which everybody knew. Eighteen years before he had married a beautiful girl, the daughter of an English merchant in Leghorn and his Italian wife. They had lived together for a year, and the little Rita had been born, when young Bonamy took his wife “home” with great delight and pride to exhibit her to his friends. She had scarcely touched English soil when she fell ill; it was an ungenial season, and the Italian girl was of a delicate constitution. The young husband, to whose mind danger or death never presented themselves as possible, always rash and venturesome, and ready to trust any gleam of sunshine, had been to blame in exposing her to the severities of the spring changes and the east winds, and the result was that he who had left Leghorn in the full zenith of happiness, returned a miserable man, alone, leaving his treasure in an English grave. For years after he had been so stunned with his grief that he was capable of little but the routine of necessary work, and this period of deadly depression occurred just when there might have been hopes of promotion for him. He did not want any promotion. When he began to revive with the growth of his little girl, and to find in her a substitute for the young mother whom he had scarcely had time to know, it became a settled principle, almost a superstition in his mind, that Rita must never leave her native soil; she, at least, should never be exposed to those east winds and chilling mists of England. It became a part of the training he gave her, a part of the religion which everybody round was bound to. Whatever happened, Rita was not to leave Italy; the risks her mother had succumbed to were never to touch her. His living, his expectations, his life itself, were nothing in comparison with this. He was not a man of a strong mind, as may be easily perceived. There was but one thing which was utterly precious to him, and that was naturally the first thing in his thoughts.