‘Do not mistrust him,’ she said soothingly. ‘He may perhaps even now find a way out of it.’ Fulvia pushed her hair back, and looked around her with a bewildered expression. ‘It seems so strange. I feel so curious. At one moment it seems as if I had been miserable for thousands of years and never should be anything else. Then, all in a moment, I feel as if it were a dream--all nonsense--and that I had imagined it all. Perhaps it will turn out to be so.’ She looked desolately at Minna. ‘Has--has anything been said about the time of this? Did he want to be married soon?’ ‘As soon as possible, but he is obliged to go away for a little while first, to London, where his business is. And there was something about lawyers and settlements. I don’t know what; I don’t understand it.’ ‘Is he coming again to-night?’ ‘Yes, I believe so. But not to dinner. Yes, he is coming to-night,’ she said in an apathetic voice, as if the last point of emotion had been reached, and she was past feeling anything more. ‘I suppose he will come every night until he goes away.’ Minna was silent. All sorts of wild plans and projects went careering through her mind. So far as she could gather, the bargain, though clinched between the two parties in authority--Marchmont and Signora Dietrich--had not yet been formally ratified in presence of the object of barter--Fulvia, to wit. That part of the affair was probably to come off to-night, when the victim would be adorned for the sacrificial altar, and crowned, so to speak, with garlands. What was to be done? She kept stupidly repeating to herself, ‘Something must be done!’ but she knew perfectly well that the something did not exist, could not be done, could not be brought about by anything short of a miracle. Fulvia Dietrich, legally and by the iron traditions of her nationality, was as absolutely her mother’s chattel, and at her mother’s disposal, as if she had been a basket of oranges which the signora had bought in the market. It was the mother’s duty to see the girl provided for, either by marriage, or by sending her into a convent, or by disposing of her in some way, decently and in order. And in the proposed arrangement everything necessary had been attended to--everything outwardly necessary, that is. There was money, something which for want of a better name might be called position, honourable marriage, a future free from pecuniary cares, if from nothing else. It was most fortunate that the dispenser of all these things should make the impression upon nine persons out of ten of being a horror--a sort of moral reptile--to be whose wife must be, for any decent girl, hell upon earth. Minna felt it to her inmost soul. That, however, did not help, did not give her the power to arrest the action of Signora Dietrich, and could effect nothing towards the saving of Fulvia from her fate.