object was not to lose Donna Tullia by letting her feel any
disappointment at the discovery recently made by the old Prince. Donna
Tullia listened with breathless interest until he had finished.

"What a man you are, Ugo! How you turn defeat into victory! Is it all
really true? Do you think we can do it?"

"If I were to die this instant," Del Ferice asseverated, solemnly raising
his hand, "it is all perfectly true, so help me God!"

He hoped, for many reasons, that he was not perjuring himself.

"What shall we do, then?" asked Madame Mayer.

"Let them marry first, and then we shall be sure of humiliating them
both," he answered. Unconsciously he repeated the very determination
which Giovanni had formed against him the night before. "Meanwhile,
you and I can consult the lawyers and see how this thing can best be
accomplished quickly and surely," he added.

"You will have to send for the innkeeper--"

"I will go and see him. It will not be hard to persuade him to claim his
lawful rights."

Del Ferice remained some time in conversation with Donna Tullia. The
magnitude of the scheme fascinated her, and instead of thinking of
breaking her promise to Ugo as she had intended doing, she so far fell
under his influence as to name the wedding-day,--Easter Monday, they
agreed, would exactly suit them and their plans. Indeed the idea of
refusing to fulfil her engagement had been but the result of a transitory
fit of anger; if she had had any fear of making a misalliance in marrying
Del Ferice, the way in which the world received the news of the
engagement removed all such apprehension from her mind. Del Ferice was
already treated with increased respect--the very servants began to call
him "Eccellenza," a distinction to which he neither had, nor could ever
have, any kind of claim, but which pleased Donna Tullia's vain soul. The
position which Ugo had obtained for himself by an assiduous attention to
the social claims and prejudices of social lights and oracles, was
suddenly assured to him, and rendered tenfold more brilliant by the news
of his alliance with Donna Tullia. He excited no jealousies either; for
Donna Tullia's peculiarities were of a kind which seemed to have
interfered from the first with her matrimonial projects. As a young girl,
a relation of the Saracinesca, whom she now so bitterly hated, she should
have been regarded as marriageable by any of the young Roman nobles, from
Valdarno down. But she had only a sm