Think of it, we are free--free! Free to make life a long dream of delight--delight more perfect than angels can know! The greatest blessing that could have befallen us is the death of Fabio, and now that we are all in all to each other, do not harden yourself against me! Nina, be gentle with me--of all things in the world, surely love is best!" She smiled, with the pretty superior smile of a young empress pardoning a recreant subject, and suffered him to draw her again, but with more gentleness, into his embrace.

She put up her lips to meet his--I looked on like a man in a dream! I saw them cling together--each kiss they exchanged was a fresh stab to my tortured soul.
"You are so foolish, Guido mio" she pouted, passing her little jeweled fingers through his clustering hair with a light caress--"so impetuous--so jealous! I have told you over and over again that I love you! Do you not remember that night when Fabio sat out on the balcony reading his Plato, poor fellow!"-- here she laughed musically--"and we were trying over some songs in the drawing--room--did I not say then that I loved you best of any one in the world?
You know I did! You ought to be satisfied!" Guido smiled, and stroked her shining golden curls.
"I AM satisfied," he said, without any trace of his former heated impatience--"perfectly satisfied.

But do not expect to find love without jealousy.

Fabio was never jealous--I know--he trusted you too implicitly--he was nothing of a lover, believe me! He thought more of himself than of you.

A man who will go away for days at a time on solitary yachting and rambling excursions, leaving his wife to her own devices--a man who reads Plato in preference to looking after HER, decides his own fate, and deserves to be ranked with those so-called wise but most ignorant philosophers to whom Woman has always remained an unguessed riddle.