"Sent by Signor Giraldi----"
"What! as if I would have allowed myself to be sent if I had not chosen."
"Of your own accord then--so much the better! And how did she take it?" Bertalda burst into a ringing laugh.
"My goodness!" cried she, "it was a farce! She did not know whether to thank me on her knees, or to trample me under her feet. I think she mentally did first one and then the other, whilst with clasped hands, and crying as I never saw a girl cry before, she stood in front of me, and then raged about the room with uplifted arms, as I never saw any one rage before either. First she called me a saint, a penitent Magdalen, I don't know what all, and a moment after a hussy, a--well, I don't know what either. It went on so for at least an hour without pause, and the end of the story was----"
"That you were not to presume to return?"
"Heaven forbid! To-morrow I was to return, and then it would all begin over again, and it really is too wearisome, I say, and I shall not go there again to-morrow." Bertalda got up with one last energetic tap of her boots. Giraldi remained sitting, stroking his beard.
"You are right," he said; "do not go there again to-morrow, nor the next day; on the third day she will come to you." Bertalda bent forward to look more closely at the man, who said this with such certainty, as if he were reading it from a paper which lay on the table before him.
"Supposing, of course," continued Giraldi, "that you do not answer the letter which she will write to you on the second day, and that altogether you play at drawing back a little as a person whose kindness has been misunderstood, and so on. If you can and will do this we remain friends; if you will not--it is not well to make an enemy of me, believe me." Bertalda rose and went behind her chair, and leant both her elbows on the back.
"If I only knew," she said, "what you have to do with it all?"
"And if you knew?"