I never knew anything of the late Signor Aldini except a full-length portrait, at the entrance to the gallery, in a superb frame, which stood out a little from the wall, and seemed to command a long file of ancestors, each darker and more venerable than the last, who receded, in chronological order, into the obscure depths of that vast room. Torquato Aldini was dressed in the latest fashion of his time, with a shirt-frill of Flanders lace and a morning coat of apple-green cloth with bright red frogs. He was beautifully frizzled and powdered. But, despite the elegance of that pastoral undress, I could not look at him without lowering my eyes; for there was upon his yellowish-brown face, in his blazing black eye, on his sneering and disdainful mouth, in his impassive attitude, and even in the dictatorial gesture of his long, thin, diamond-laden hand, such an expression of overbearing arrogance and inflexible harshness as I had never met with under the roof of that palace. It was a beautiful portrait, and the portrait of a handsome young man. He died at twenty-five, from wounds received in a duel with a Foscari, who dared to say that he was of a better family. He had left behind him a great reputation for courage and decision of character, but it was whispered that he had made his wife very unhappy, and the servants did not seem to regret him. He had kept them in such a state of dread that they never passed that picture after dark, startlingly true to life as it was, without uncovering as they would have done before their former master in person. His hardness of heart must have caused the signora much suffering, and have disgusted her with the married state, for she refused to enter into a new contract, and rejected the best _partis_ in the Republic. And yet she evidently had a yearning for love, for she tolerated Count Lanfranchi's assiduous attentions and seemed to deny him none of the joys of marriage except the indissoluble oath. After a year, the count, abandoning all hope of inspiring in her the necessary confidence for such an engagement as he desired, sought fortune elsewhere, and confessed to her that a certain wealthy heiress gave him more reason to hope. The signora generously gave him his liberty at once. She seemed depressed and ill for a few days, but at the end of a month the Prince of Montalegri took the place in the gondola left vacant by the ungrateful Lanfranchi, and for another year Mandola and I rowed that amiable and seemingly fortunate couple about the lagoons.