"Thank Heaven you don't, pray Heaven you never may," said her inconsequential friend. "For love-love is a plague. You meet a person, for example, in a garden. You know nothing whatever about her, not even her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt. You meet her not more than half a dozen times all told. And suddenly one morning you wake up to discover that she has become to you the person of first importance in the world. She is practically a total stranger to you, she's of a different nationality, a different rank, yet she's infinitely the most precious and important person in the world. When you're absent from her you can do nothing but think of her, gloating with throes of aromatic pain over the memory of your last meeting with her, longing with soul-hunger for your next. The merest flutter of her gown, modulation of her voice, glance of her eye, will throw your heart into a palpitation. You look in the direction of the house that she inhabits, and you feel the emotions of a Peri looking at the gate of Eden. And it gives you the strangest sort of strange joy to talk about her, though of course you take pains to talk about her in veiled terms, obliquely, so that your listener shan't guess _whom_ you are talking about. In short, she is the be-all and the end-all of your existence,--and you don't even know her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt." He lolled back at ease on the marble bench, and twirled his yellow-red moustaches, fancy free. "But you do know her name," said Annunziata, simply, in her deepest voice, holding him with a gaze, lucent and serious, that seemed almost reproachful. "Her name is Maria Dolores." The thing was tolerably unexpected. What wonder if it put my hero out of countenance? His attitude grew rigid, his pink skin three shades pinker; his blue eyes stared at her, startled. So for a second; then he relaxed, and laughed, laughed long and heartily, perhaps a little despitefully too, at his own expense. ... But he must try, if he might, to repair the mischief. "My poor child," he said, resting his hand on her curls, and gently smoothing them. "You are what the French call an _enfant terrible_. You are what the English call a deuced sharp little pickle. And I must try, if I can, without actually lying, to persuade you that you are utterly mistaken, utterly and absolutely mistaken,"--he raised his voice, for greater convincingness,--"and that her name is nothing distantly resembling the name that you have spoken, and that in fact her name is Mrs. Harris, and that in fine there is no such person, and that I was merely talking hypothetically, in abstractions; I must draw a herring across the trail, I must raise a dust, and throw a lot of it into your amazingly clear-sighted little eyes. Now, is it definitely impressed upon you that her name is _not_--the thrice-adorable name you mentioned?"