“Ah!” said Fanchette--“if your Highness would only believe in the fondness of the intentions that actuated me. But since they are misunderstood, it is no good to dwell upon them. Only----” “Only what, Fanchette?” “Since our smallness, and envy, and painted coxcombry are not to your Highness’s taste, we had best retire, and leave you to your own devices. You will do what you will do; and I have done, in all disinterestedness, what I could. Perhaps you will believe me that, even while I was outraging my own feelings to try and safeguard your reputation, I was providing alternatively for the step from which I foresaw you would not be easily dissuaded.” She spoke at last like an injured saint; but the venom in her heart, over that contumelious reference to her lover, was rankling and growing in bitter intensity as she recovered more and more her confidence. “What step, Fanchette?” asked Isabella faintly. The girl shrugged her shoulders slightly. “Into the dark--that is all I can say--except that I know where someone is most likely to be found within the next few days.” She knelt back, sniffing and mopping her eyes, while a silence of some minutes prevailed; and then a sad little voice came to her: “Who shall throw the first stone? O, Fanchette, we are all sinners together!” CHAPTER XXIII. “IN THE SILENT WOODY PLACES” Bissy had a lodger--strictly Bissy, be it understood. Grandfather Aquaviva had declined from the first to be mixed up in the affair, or to do more than subordinate, for the occasion, his own domestic authority to that of the self-sufficient imp, who was wiser than an owl in his precocious generation. To Bissy was due the happy thought, the conduct of the negotiations which followed, and the ultimate agreement. He accepted the guest, and any responsibility attaching to him--which, nevertheless, he did not anticipate would be serious. Report, in that detached province of horticulture, dealt mistily with reputations, and Bissy, while having his own clues to the stranger’s identity, had no reason to connect that with any definite scandal. In any case, where ignorance was cash, it was folly to be wise. Let the lodger call himself what he would--il Signor Talé, or by any other mocking pseudonym--the essential consideration was the ducats, of which he was not sparing. For the first time in his life Bissy enjoyed the gratification of realising handsomely on his own native shrewdness. Grandfather, always preoccupied and unsuspecting, was content to laugh, to shrug his shoulders, and secretly to admire the elfish self-importance which had so much worldly foresight in it. He had the same clues to identification as the limb himself, but they lay unnoticed by him. Men and women always passed him by like shadows. They were only to be regarded as coming between the sun and his flower-beds, and the sooner they were gone the better for his content.