As soon as what? The summons from Cragsfoot—the call back to home and home life (my appointment to our London office was now ratified)—brought me up against that question. I could answer it only by saying—as soon as Lucinda’s affair had somehow settled itself. She could not be left where she was; as a permanency, the present situation was intolerable. She must yield or she must go; Valdez would never let her alone, short of her adopting one of those alternatives; he would keep on at his pestering and posturing. She had no money; her mother had lived on an annuity, or an allowance, or something of that kind, which expired with the good lady herself. Clearly, however, she was able to support herself. She must not sell flowers on the Piazza all her life; I thought that she would consent to borrow enough money from me to set herself up in a modest way in business, and I determined to make that proposal to her on the morrow—as soon as we had got through the ordeal of this evening’s dinner. I fervently hoped that we might get through it without a flare-up between Arsenio and his honored guest Godfrey Frost. Out of favor at Briarmount was he, that young man? I could easily have told Sir Paget the reason for that! The only one of the prospective party whom I encountered in the course of the afternoon—though I admit that I haunted the Piazza in the hope of seeing Lucinda—was the host himself. I met him in company with a tall, lean visaged, eminently respectable person, wearing a tall hat and a black frock coat. Arsenio stopped me, and introduced me to his companion. He said that Signor Alessandro Panizzi and I ought to know one another; I didn’t see why, and merely supposed that he was exhibiting his respectable friend, who was, it appeared, one of the leading lawyers in Venice and, indeed, an ex-Syndic of the city. Signor Panizzi, on his part, treated Arsenio with the greatest deference; he referred to him, in the course of our brief conversation, as “our noble friend,” and was apparently hugely gratified by the familiar, if somewhat lordly, bearing which Arsenio adopted towards him. But, after all, Arsenio was now rich—notoriously so, thanks to the way in which wealth had come to him; one could understand that he might be regarded as a highly-to-be-valued citizen of Venice. Perhaps he was going to run for Mayor himself—one more brilliant device to dazzle Lucinda!