SHE courted me, and I accepted her courtship in unresponsive silence.

I played the part of a taciturn and reserved man, who preferred reading some ancient and abstruse treatise on metaphysics to even the charms of her society--and often, when she urgently desired my company, I would sit in her drawing-room, turning over the leaves of a book and feigning to be absorbed in it, while she, from her velvet fauteuil, would look at me with a pretty pensiveness made up half of respect, half of gentle admiration--a capitally acted facial expression, by the bye, and one that would do credit to Sarah Bernhardt.

We had both heard from Guido Ferrari; his letter to my wife I of course did not see; she had, however, told me he was "much shocked and distressed to hear of Stella's death." The epistle he addressed to me had a different tale to tell.

In it he wrote--"YOU can understand, my dear conte, that I am not much grieved to hear of the death of Fabio's child.

Had she lived, I confess her presence would have been a perpetual reminder to me of things I prefer to forget.