ocurator, asked me to take him to her house. In the height
of the conversation, what should come but a gondola, and we saw Count
Rosemberg, the ambassador from Vienna, getting out of it. M. Memmo was
thunderstruck (for a Venetian noble conversing with a foreign ambassador
becomes guilty of treason to the state), and ran in hot haste from
Ancilla's room, I after him, but on the stair he met the ambassador, who,
seeing his distress, burst into a laugh, and passed on. I got directly
into M. Memmo's gondola, and we went forthwith to M. Cavalli, secretary
to the State Inquisitors. M. Memmo could have taken no better course to
avoid the troublesome consequences which this fatal meeting might have
had, and he was very glad that I was with him to testify to his innocence
and to the harmlessness of the occurrence.

M. Cavalli received M. Memmo with a smile, and told him he did well to
come to confession without wasting any time. M. Memmo, much astonished at
this reception, told him the brief history of the meeting, and the
secretary replied with a grave air that he had no doubt as to the truth
of his story, as the circumstances were in perfect correspondence with
what he knew of the matter.

We came away extremely puzzled at the secretary's reply, and discussed
the subject for some time, but then we came to the conclusion that M.
Cavalli could have had no positive knowledge of the matter before we
came, and that he only spoke as he did from the instinct of an
Inquisitor, who likes it to be understood that nothing is hid from him
for a moment.

After the death of Ancilla, Mr. Murray remained without a titular
mistress, but, fluttering about like a butterfly, he had, one after
another, the prettiest girls in Venice. This good-natured Epicurean set
out for Constantinople two years later, and was for twenty years the
ambassador of the Court of St. James at the Sublime Porte. He returned to
Venice in 1778 with the intention of ending his days there, far from
affairs of state, but he died in the lazaretto eight days before the
completion of his quarantine.

At play fortune continued to favour me; my commerce with M---- M---- could
not be discovered now that I was my own waterman; and the nuns who were
in the secret were too deeply involved not to keep it. I led them a merry
life, but I foresaw that as soon as M. de Bernis decided to let
M---- M---- know that he would not return to Venice, he would recall his
people, and we should