aving returned, she believed I
had poisoned his mind against her. "It would be no kindness to the poor
gentleman, I can tell you that," she said. "He has come to see me every
evening for years. It's a long friendship! No one knows him as well as
I."

"I don't pretend to know him or to understand him," I said. "He's a
mystery! Nevertheless, he seems to me a little--" And I touched my
forehead and waved my hand in the air.

Serafina glanced at her companion a moment, as if for inspiration. He
contented himself with shrugging his shoulders as he filled his glass
again. The _padrona_ hereupon gave me a more softly insinuating smile
than would have seemed likely to bloom on so candid a brow. "It's for
that that I love him!" she said. "The world has so little kindness for
such persons. It laughs at them, and despises them, and cheats them. He
is too good for this wicked life! It's his fancy that he finds a little
Paradise up here in my poor apartment. If he thinks so, how can I help
it? He has a strange belief--really, I ought to be ashamed to tell
you--that I resemble the Blessed Virgin: Heaven forgive me! I let him
think what he pleases, so long as it makes him happy. He was very kind
to me once, and I am not one that forgets a favour. So I receive him
every evening civilly, and ask after his health, and let him look at me
on this side and that! For that matter, I may say it without vanity, I
was worth looking at once! And he's not always amusing, poor man! He
sits sometimes for an hour without speaking a word, or else he talks
away, without stopping, on art and nature, and beauty and duty, and fifty
fine things that are all so much Latin to me. I beg you to understand
that he has never said a word to me that I mightn't decently listen to.
He may be a little cracked, but he's one of the blessed saints."

"Eh!" cried the man, "the blessed saints were all a little cracked!"

Serafina, I fancied, left part of her story untold; but she told enough
of it to make poor Theobald's own statement seem intensely pathetic in
its exalted simplicity. "It's a strange fortune, certainly," she went
on, "to have such a friend as this dear man--a friend who is less than a
lover and more than a friend." I glanced at her companion, who preserved
an impenetrable smile, twisted the end of his moustache, and disposed of
a copious mouthful. Was _he_ less than a lover? "But what will you
have?" Serafina pursued. "In thi