Rita was busy with her housekeeping, arranging the affairs of the day. Her husband was in the office at his work; her father gone out, no doubt about business; her little children enjoying the morning air in the garden. All had begun pleasantly as usual in the well-ordered, calmly constituted life. She had been a little disturbed, a very little, last night by her visitors, with the slightest possible jealousy in her mind of the new-comer, who seemed to have some sort of connection with her husband’s early life, that portion of it with which she was completely unacquainted. It was a mere superficial sentiment, not strong enough to be called jealousy, yet veering that way; for she did not like to think that anybody anywhere could know more about her Harry than his wife, a feeling which even in its most unreasonable phases is not uncommon among wives--or husbands either, for that matter. But _that_ Miss Joscelyn was going away, was gone away so far as the Vice-Consul’s household was concerned, and Rita thought no more of her--She was interrupted in the very midst of her discussion of the _spese_, and examination of the contents of the cook’s basket, which old Benedetta was helping to turn over, and making sharp remarks upon, to the damage of the cook’s temper, as so much dearer and not nearly so good as in her time--by a message that a lady wanted to see her. She was predisposed to be annoyed by it. “A lady! how often must I tell you to bring me the name! It can be nobody for me; it must be some one for your master,” she said. The man was very humble and apologetic; he represented that the English names were very hard to pronounce; that it was the young lady who had been there last evening--the young lady who resembled the bambino so much. “Resembled the bambino? What bambino?” cried Rita. And then old Benedetta burst in and explained that all the servants had remarked it--that the English young lady was the very image of nostro bambino, our own blessed baby whom everybody admired. “Resemblances are very strange,” Benedetta said; “they will come without rhyme or reason--for of course our darling can have nothing to do with a stranger--a young Signorina Inglese whom no one ever saw before.”