Not long since, I was one among a crowd of nobodies at a big official reception in Paris when the Marchese and Marchesa di San Silvestro were announced. There was a momentary hush; those about the doorway fell back to let this distinguished couple pass, and some of us stood on tiptoe to get a glimpse of them; for San Silvestro is a man of no small importance in the political and diplomatic world, and his wife enjoys quite a European fame for beauty and amiability, having had opportunities of displaying both these attractive gifts at the several courts where she has acted as Italian ambassadress. They made their way quickly up the long room,--she short, rather sallow, inclined toward embonpoint, but with eyes whose magnificence was rivalled only by that of her diamonds; he bald-headed, fat, gray-haired, covered with orders,--and were soon out of sight. I followed them with a sigh which caused my neighbour to ask me jocosely whether the marchesa was an old flame of mine. “Far from it,” I answered. “Only the sight of her reminded me of bygone days. Dear, dear me! how time does slip on! It is fifteen years since I saw her last.” I moved away, looking down rather ruefully at the waistcoat to whose circumference fifteen years have made no trifling addition, and wondering whether I was really as much altered and aged in appearance as the marchesa was. Fifteen years--it is no such very long time; and yet I dare say that the persons principally concerned in the incident which I am about to relate have given up thinking about it as completely as I had done, until the sound of that lady’s name, and the sight of her big black eyes, recalled it to me, and set me thinking of the sunny spring afternoon on which my sister Anne and I journeyed from Verona to Venice, and of her naive exclamations of delight on finding herself in a real gondola, gliding smoothly down the Grand Canal. My sister Anne is by some years my senior. She is what might be called an old lady now, and she certainly was an old maid then, and had long accepted her position as such. Then, as now, she habitually wore a gray alpaca gown, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, gloves a couple of sizes too large for her, and a shapeless, broad-leaved straw hat, from which a blue veil was flung back and streamed out in the breeze behind her, like a ship’s ensign. Then, as now, she was the simplest, the most kind-hearted, the most prejudiced of mortals; an enthusiastic admirer of the arts, and given, as her own small contribution thereto, to the production of endless water-colour landscapes, a trifle woolly, indeed, as to outline, and somewhat faulty as to perspective, but warm in colouring, and highly thought of in the family. I believe, in fact, that it was chiefly with a view to the filling of her portfolio that she had persuaded me to take her to Venice; and, as I am constitutionally indolent, I was willing enough to spend a few weeks in the city which, of all cities in the world, is