"Ah," said I, "what a long breath I drew when I heard of it! I remember the place and the hour. It was at a hill-station in India, seven years after I had left Florence. The post brought me some English papers, and in one of them was a letter from Italy, with a lot of so-called 'fashionable intelligence.' There, among various scandals in high life, and other delectable items, I read that the Countess Bianca Salvi, famous for some years as the presiding genius of the most agreeable salon in Florence, was about to bestow her hand upon Count Camerino, a distinguished Bolognese. Ah, my dear boy, it was a tremendous escape! I had been ready to marry the woman who was capable of that! But my instinct had warned me, and I had trusted my instinct." "'Instinct's everything,' as Falstaff says!" And Stanmer began to laugh. "Did you tell Madame de Salvi that your instinct was against her?" "No; I told her that she frightened me, shocked me, horrified me." "That's about the same thing. And what did she say?" "She asked me what I would have? I called her friendship with Camerino a scandal, and she answered that her husband had been a brute. Besides, no one knew it; therefore it was no scandal. Just _your_ argument! I retorted that this was odious reasoning, and that she had no moral sense. We had a passionate argument, and I declared I would never see her again. In the heat of my displeasure I left Florence, and I kept my vow. I never saw her again." "You couldn't have been much in love with her," said Stanmer. "I was not--three months after." "If you had been you would have come back--three days after." "So doubtless it seems to you. All I can say is that it was the great effort of my life. Being a military man, I have had on various occasions to face time enemy. But it was not then I needed my resolution; it was when I left Florence in a post-chaise." Stanmer turned about the room two or three times, and then he said: "I don't understand! I don't understand why she should have told you that Camerino had killed her husband. It could only damage her." "She was afraid it would damage her more that I should think he was her lover. She wished to say the thing that would most effectually persuade me that he was not her lover--that he could never be. And then she wished to get the credit of being very frank." "Good heavens, how you must have analysed her!" cried my companion, staring. "There is nothing so analytic as disillusionment. But there it is. She married Camerino." "Yes, I don't lime that," said Stanmer. He was silent a while, and then he added--"Perhaps she wouldn't have done so if you had remained." He has a little innocent way! "Very likely she would have dispensed with the ceremony," I answered, drily. "Upon my word," he said, "you _have_ analysed her!" "You ought to be grateful to me. I have done for you what you seem unable to do for yourself." "I don't see any Camerino in my case," he said.