rose at our feet. I gave the infant back to the
nurse, who waited to receive it, and said, with a smile, "Tell my wife
we have welcomed her May-blossom."

Guido laid his hand on my shoulder as the servant retired; his face was
unusually pale.

"Thou art a good fellow, Fabio!" he said, abruptly.

"Indeed! How so?" I asked, half laughingly; "I am no better than other
men."

"You are less suspicious than the majority," he returned, turning away
from me and playing idly with a spray of clematis that trailed on one
of the pillars of the veranda.

I glanced at him in surprise. "What do you mean, amico? Have I reason
to suspect any one?"

He laughed and resumed his seat at the breakfast-table.

"Why, no!" he answered, with a frank look. "But in Naples the air is
pregnant with suspicion--jealousy's dagger is ever ready to strike,
justly or unjustly--the very children are learned in the ways of vice.
Penitents confess to priests who are worse than penitents, and by
Heaven! in such a state of society, where conjugal fidelity is a
farce"--he paused a moment, and then went on--"is it not wonderful to
know a man like you, Fabio? A man happy in home affections, without a
cloud on the sky of his confidence?"

"I have no cause for distrust," I said. "Nina is as innocent as the
little child of whom she is to-day the mother."

"True!" exclaimed Ferrari. "Perfectly true!" and he looked me full in
the eyes, with a smile. "White as the virgin snow on the summit of Mont
Blanc--purer than the flawless diamond--and unapproachable as the
furthest star! Is it not so?"

I assented with a certain gravity; something in his manner puzzled me.
Our conversation soon turned on different topics, and I thought no more
of the matter. But a time came--and that speedily--when I had stern
reason to remember every word he had uttered.

CHAPTER II.

Every one knows what kind of summer we had in Naples in 1884. The
newspapers of all lands teemed with the story of its horrors. The
cholera walked abroad like a destroying demon; under its withering
touch scores of people, young and old, dropped down in the streets to
die. The fell disease, born of dirt and criminal neglect of sanitary
precautions, gained on the city with awful rapidity, and worse even
than the plague was the unreasoning but universal panic. The
never-to-be-forgotten heroism of King Humbert had its effect on the
more educated classes, but among the low Neapolitan populace,