Mr. Luigi made no reply for some minutes. Then he made some exclamations in Italian, scarcely knowing, I am sure, what he was saying. Then he remembered himself. “Thing most strange! thing most terrible!” cried the young man; “not even now!--not even now!” and he looked round to us with such distress and amazement in his face, and with such an involuntary call for our sympathy, though we knew nothing about it, that his look went to my heart. Aunt Milly saw it, and was confounded by it. His genuine wonder and strange grieved consciousness that she ought to have known this secret, whatever it was, stopped her questions upon her lips. She sat leaning forward looking at him, struck dumb by his looks. I was so excited by the evident reserve on both sides, which implied the existence of a third person whom neither would name, that I burst into it, on the spur of the moment, without thinking whether what I said was sensible or foolish. “Who?” I cried, “who is the other person that knows?” Both of them started violently; then their eyes met in a strange look of intelligence. Aunt Milly fell back in her chair trembling dreadfully, trembling so much that her teeth chattered. Mr. Luigi rose. “I am at Madame’s disposition,” he said softly; “but what can I say? It is better I be gone while I do not harm Madame, and make her ill. Pardon! it is not I who am to blame!” Saying so, he took Aunt Milly’s hand, kissed it, and turned to the door. She called him back faintly. “Stop, I have not asked you rightly,” said poor Aunt Milly. “Could not you tell me, without minding anybody else? Are you--are you?--oh! _who_ are you? I do beseech you tell me. If wrong is done you, I have no hand in it. What is there to prevent you telling me?” “Ah, pardon. I know my duty,” said the young man. “If she _will_ reject me--then! but it is yet too early. I wait--I expect--she has not yet said it to me.” Aunt Milly gathered herself up gradually, with a strange fluttered look in her eyes. “_Reject_ you! God bless us! it is some mistake, after all. Do you know who it is you are speaking of? Do you know if it is my sister Sarah? She is my elder sister, ten years older than me,--old enough to be your mother--is it she? or, oh, God help us! is it a mistake?”