“It will suit me better than any other day,” replied the Marchese. “I have myself to go to Rome almost at once. I shall never cease to be thankful to Fate for having so delayed my departure as to enable me to have the pleasure of meeting Sir Percival Cleave. You will come in the afternoon and eat a simple dinner at our table. You are already acquainted with the road to the Castle?”
“Oh yes—that is, no; I do not know the road, but I do not suppose I shall have any difficulty in finding it out.”
“What!” the Marchese had turned once more to his wife and had assumed the tone of a reproof. “What! you did not make Sir Percival aware of the direction to the Castle?”
“Sir Percival has been studying a map of the Bay,” said she. “Though he has never before been here he shows a remarkable acquaintance with the neighbourhood.”
“It is not right to take so much for granted,” said the Marchese. “Allow me to repair the negligence of the Marchesa, Sir Percival.”
He then pointed out to the Englishman the direction to take in order to reach the road leading to the cliffs a mile beyond Sorrento, where the Castello del Grippo stood in the centre of its olive-groves. Sir Percival thanked him, and said that having received such plain directions he would not now carry out his intention of driving to the castle; he would ride there instead.
Before the Marchese and his wife took their departure, the latter had managed to whisper in the ear of Sir Percival as she returned the pressure of his hand—
“Without fail.”
“Till one of us dies,” he replied.
How strange it all was! he thought that night as he stood at the door of the inn where he was staying at Sorrento, and listened to the singing of the fishermen putting out to sea. How strange it all was! The seven years that had passed since he had last heard the hymn of the fishermen in that Bay seemed no more than so many days. He had had his adventures since he had been so foolish as to fancy himself in love with Paolina—poor Paolina! A good many faces had interposed between the face of the Italian girl of 1815 and the face of the Italian Marchesa in 1822. But what a whimsical fate it was that had made him fall in love with the Marchesa del Grippo more deeply than he had ever permitted himself to fall in regard to other women! He had never known what it was to love before, though she was the woman whom he should have avoided, even if there were no other woman to love in the wide world.