It is the maxim of sailors that they who whistle for a breath of air will bring a storm. Our travellers only longed for the former, but they were soon enveloped by the latter, through which they contrived to struggle till, on the 20th of September, they made Syracuse, and were inexorably condemned to a quarantine of the legitimate forty days’ duration. At the end of this time an Austrian vessel conveyed them to Rome. After a brief but by no means a dull sojourn in that city, the Princess led the way to her home in the Villa d’Este, on the Lake of Como, where she and the Countess Oldi exhibited the proficiency they had acquired as travellers by cooking their own dinners and performing other little feats of amiable independency. And now, as if to authorise the simile made with respect to the illustrious party, and their resemblance to a strolling company of players, private theatricals became the most frequent pastime of the lady of the villa and her friends. If she enacted the heroine, the Baron was sure to be the lover. Marie Antoinette, it was said, used to act in plays on the little stage at Trianon. The case was not to be denied; but then the wife of Louis XVI. did not exchange mock heroics with an ex-courier. On the other hand, the dukes and counts she played with were often less respectable than the loosest of menials. The agents, whose employers were to be found in England, had not been idle during the Princess’s period of travel. They had been helped by none so effectually as by herself. She had courted infamy by her heedless conduct, and, cruelly as she was used, the blame does not rest wholly with her persecutors. Her indiscretions seemed indulged in expressly to give warrant for suspicion that she was more than indiscreet, and therewith even the most innocent incidents were twisted by the ingenuity of spies and their agents into crimes. The Baron d’Ompteda had been the most assiduous and the best paid of the spies who hovered incessantly about her, to misrepresent all he was permitted to see. He was banished from the Austrian territory at the request of the Princess, whose champion, the gallant Lieutenant Hownam, sought in vain to bring him to battle and punish him for his treachery towards a lady. On the other hand, the Austrian authorities commanded Bergami to divest himself of the Cross of Malta, which he was wearing without legal authorisation--a disgrace which his rash and imprudent mistress thought she had effaced by purchasing for the disknighted chevalier an estate, and putting him in full possession of the rights and dignity of lord of the manor.