t embarrassed, prepared to follow him.

Andrea dared not detain her.

Giardini came to the rescue.

"But you heard, signora," said he. "Your husband has left you to settle
some little matters with the Signor Conte."

Marianna sat down again, but without raising her eyes to Andrea, who
hesitated before speaking.

"And will not Signor Gambara's confidence entitle me to his wife's?"
he said in agitated tones. "Can the fair Marianna refuse to tell me the
story of her life?"

"My life!" said Marianna. "It is the life of the ivy. If you wish to
know the story of my heart, you must suppose me equally destitute of
pride and of modesty if you can ask me to tell it after what you have
just heard."

"Of whom, then, can I ask it?" cried the Count, in whom passion was
blinding his wits.

"Of yourself," replied Marianna. "Either you understand me by this time,
or you never will. Try to ask yourself."

"I will, but you must listen. And this hand, which I am holding, is to
lie in mine as long as my narrative is truthful."

"I am listening," said Marianna.

"A woman's life begins with her first passion," said Andrea. "And my
dear Marianna began to live only on the day when she first saw Paolo
Gambara. She needed some deep passion to feed upon, and, above all, some
interesting weakness to shelter and uphold. The beautiful woman's nature
with which she is endowed is perhaps not so truly passion as maternal
love.

"You sigh, Marianna? I have touched one of the aching wounds in your
heart. It was a noble part for you to play, so young as you were,--that
of protectress to a noble but wandering intellect. You said to yourself:
'Paolo will be my genius; I shall be his common sense; between us we
shall be that almost divine being called an angel,--the sublime creature
that enjoys and understands, reason never stifling love.'

"And then, in the first impetus of youth, you heard the thousand voices
of nature which the poet longed to reproduce. Enthusiasm clutched you
when Paolo spread before you the treasures of poetry, while seeking to
embody them in the sublime but restricted language of music; you admired
him when delirious rapture carried him up and away from you, for you
liked to believe that all this devious energy would at last come down
and alight as love. But you knew not the tyrannous and jealous despotism
of the ideal over the minds that fall in love with it. Gambara, before
meeting you, had given himself over to the h