Page:Compromises (Repplier).djvu/284

 268 fear for you. Your plan about Allegra seems to me, in its present form, pregnant with irremediable infamy to all the actors in it except yourself;—in any form wherein I must actively coöperate, with inevitable destruction. I could not refuse Lord Byron's challenge; though that, however to be deprecated, would be the least in the series of mischiefs consequent upon my intervention in such a plan. I am shocked at the thoughtless violence of your designs, and I wish to put my sense of their madness in the strongest light. I may console myself, however, with the reflection that the attempt even is impossible, as I have no money. So far from being ready to lend me three or four hundred pounds, Horace Smith has lately declined to advance six or seven napoleons for a musical instrument which I wished to buy for Jane Williams in Paris. Nor have I any other friends to whom I could apply.

There was no need of heroics on the one side, nor of apprehension on the other. While Miss Clairmont was fretting and scheming in Florence, fever was scourging the Romagna, so