‘Never. I saw you undertaking duties and doing work which struck me on the spot as utterly inappropriate to your proper condition. I at once concluded that you had excellent reasons for acting as you did. I did once make a mistake, in pure absence of mind, the day I arrived with all my luggage--do you remember? You came to the door, and I spoke about my boxes instead of letting you receive me as I now know you wished to do. I have been sorry for it many a time since. Now you know exactly what I have felt in the matter.’ ‘You are right,’ he said in a low voice, and still dejectedly. ‘You are right in every word you say. The old folly has not been burnt out--the old feelings are not extinguished; since I made your acquaintance, I am sorry to say, they are stronger than before. That makes it so much the worse.’ ‘I don’t know what you mean. Surely it is all right now. Everything is explained.’ ‘Far from it. I came to see you with a purpose. Once or twice during our conversation I have thought that purpose might be abandoned; but I see now that, on the contrary, it had better be carried out. I came here intending to ask a favour of you.’ ‘And what is the favour?’ she asked gently. ‘Nothing more nor less than this: that you would leave Casa Dietrich.’ ‘Leave--Casa--Dietrich?’ echoed Minna. It was the very thing which, for many days past, she had been telling herself she would do. Perhaps it was not altogether unprecedented that, when someone else asked her to do that which she had been telling herself she would do, she should feel angry, hurt, and offended. ‘Leave Casa Dietrich?’ she repeated; ‘and why?’ ‘Because it is excessively painful to me that you should be there; very soon it will become still more painful to me. Yes; it is solely on my own account, for my own selfish reasons, that I ask you to leave Casa Dietrich.’ ‘But why, now that we thoroughly understand one another, should it be more painful for you? Surely, now all will go well. You will not mistrust me; you will not misjudge me. As for me, my opinion of you is what it has been from the first, and I see no reason to suppose that it will ever alter; therefore it should be less, not more, painful for you if I remain.’ She was so intensely in earnest about it that she had not even time to be surprised at her own sublime inconsistency. She wished to remain at Casa Dietrich, but she wished that Signor Oriole should wish her to remain. There was another long pause, during which he again studied the ground, and she saw that a struggle was going on in his mind. At last he looked up and said, in a low voice but clearly: