‘I understand that. But you must not cut yourself off from everyone and everything,’ she said in distress. ‘If you will not tell me where you are going--but, yes, you will tell me where you are going. I will never intrude upon you, never interfere with you, but I must know where you are. Give me your address. I’ll promise not even to look at it unless there is some urgent reason for my doing so.’ ‘I cannot understand why you should hold so much to it,’ he remarked; ‘but if it is so you shall have it--I will send it to you. And sometimes, if you will let me, I will come and see you.’ ‘Indeed you will, or I shall be very unhappy,’ she said, almost choked with tears. ‘I do not like this. I do not approve of it. I don’t know what to do. You have taken me utterly by surprise.’ ‘Ma che!’ he exclaimed, with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Never mind me. Here I will get out,’ he added, stopping the coachman at the entrance to a narrow street in the purlieus of Trajan’s Forum. ‘I will send you the address,’ he went on, ‘and do not be disturbed if it should be some little time before you see me again. I have need of solitude, to get accustomed to the new order of things.’ He stood beside the carriage, shutting the door, clasped her hand for a moment, baring his head, and bowing over it with an old-fashioned courtliness which all his troubles had not untaught him. ‘Grazie infinite,’ he said, resolutely smiling at her and signing to the driver to go on. Minna had a final glimpse of him standing with his hat in his hand under a street-lamp--for it was now quite dark--and looking after her. ‘It is all wrong,’ she said to herself--‘wrong from beginning to end. What will be the end of it all?’ CHAPTER XIII. Two or three weeks passed in a vacant, empty kind of way, and during those weeks Minna was almost alone. She saw Mrs. Charrington two or three times, and that lady condescended to approve of her new apartment, and of her departure from Casa Dietrich. She was even generous enough not to say how very glad she was that ‘the girl’ was married, and no longer on the spot to disturb her dear Minna’s peace of mind, and keep her entangled with ‘that set.’ She did not say it, but Minna knew very well that she felt it, and smiled to herself rather grimly.