I passed Lent, partly in the company of my loved ones, partly in the study of experimental physics at the Convent of the Salutation. My evenings were always given to M. de Malipiero’s assemblies. At Easter, in order to keep the promise I had made to the Countess of Mont-Real, and longing to see again my beautiful Lucie, I went to Pasean. I found the guests entirely different to the set I had met the previous autumn. Count Daniel, the eldest of the family, had married a Countess Gozzi, and a young and wealthy government official, who had married a god-daughter of the old countess, was there with his wife and his sister-in-law. I thought the supper very long. The same room had been given to me, and I was burning to see Lucie, whom I did not intend to treat any more like a child. I did not see her before going to bed, but I expected her early the next morning, when lo! instead of her pretty face brightening my eyes, I see standing before me a fat, ugly servant-girl! I enquire after the gatekeeper’s family, but her answer is given in the peculiar dialect of the place, and is, of course, unintelligible to me. I wonder what has become of Lucie; I fancy that our intimacy has been found out, I fancy that she is ill--dead, perhaps. I dress myself with the intention of looking for her. If she has been forbidden to see me, I think to myself, I will be even with them all, for somehow or other I will contrive the means of speaking to her, and out of spite I will do with her that which honour prevented love from accomplishing. As I was revolving such thoughts, the gate-keeper comes in with a sorrowful countenance. I enquire after his wife’s health, and after his daughter, but at the name of Lucie his eyes are filled with tears. “What! is she dead?” “Would to God she were!” “What has she done?” “She has run away with Count Daniel’s courier, and we have been unable to trace her anywhere.” His wife comes in at the moment he replies, and at these words, which renewed her grief, the poor woman faints away. The keeper, seeing how sincerely I felt for his misery, tells me that this great misfortune befell them only a week before my arrival. “I know that man l’Aigle,” I say; “he is a scoundrel. Did he ask to marry Lucie?” “No; he knew well enough that our consent would have been refused!” “I wonder at Lucie acting in such a way.” “He seduced her, and her running away made us suspect the truth, for she had become very stout.” “Had he known her long?” “About a month after your last visit she saw him for the first time. He must have thrown a spell over her, for our Lucie was as pure as a dove, and you can, I believe, bear testimony to her goodness.” “And no one knows where they are?” “No one. God alone knows what this villain will do with her.”