To Casa Dietrich that night the signora had returned, had summoned him to her rooms, and had told him that Marchmont had spoken to her about Fulvia, and that she intended to marry her to him. She had told him with the most accurate foreknowledge of the horror it would inspire in him; she had listened with smiling obstinacy to all his expostulations, reproaches and accusations, and had then told him: ‘You have yourself to thank for it. You have known for many years that I was not a woman to be played with with impunity. You have refused my reasonable wishes and demands; you must not be surprised and angry that when the time comes I act in the manner most convenient to my interests and to those of my daughter. Mio caro, I have waited a long time for freedom. This man offers it to me--freedom and independence. I shall take it. You can do what you like.’ ‘You say I played with you!’ he exclaimed. ‘And you--what have you done with me? You say I have myself to thank for it all; and you--whom have you to thank, that you are now in this position, that you must sell your child disgracefully to get what you call your freedom? Bianca, give the child to me. I will work for her; I will provide for her. She shall be no burden to you.’ Bianca had laughed. ‘And I?’ she asked. ‘My daughter is no burden to me. She is the most valuable piece of property I have. No; I have made up my mind. Do not trouble yourself in the matter. It is all right.’ All this scene came back to him with the utmost vividness as he stood there in this English house, looking forth upon this English park, with the fresh damp English air blowing upon his forehead and face. He felt it not. He was again steeped in a totally different atmosphere, in the soft, deliciously enervating air of Rome--the odour of the streets, of the houses; that peculiar, half-pungent, half-debilitating perfume which assails the senses there, and bathes them, and takes them captive, pervading everything, and which is like no other atmosphere in the world--this ichor he felt and imbibed now, and it was like new life to him. The past, dark and mysterious beyond all words to describe, with its processions of Caesars, its armies of trained fighting men, its dream of fair women of every shade of vice and virtue, its holocausts of human victims--the blood-soaked, sun-soaked, art-soaked past; the vivid, noisy present, full of life and action, of battles fought and of grand hope for the future, in which his life had been passed--all these were summed up and concentrated as it were in that wondrously scented air of Rome, and in Rome he now was, with a fever in his veins, a passion of longing which tore his heart-strings, parted his lips, and drew from his heart a slight sound, between a groan and a sigh. ‘Dahin, dahin geht unser Weg-- O Vater, lass’ uns zieh’n!’ Not Mignon’s words, but Mignon’s thought was in his heart.