Page:Stories Revived (3 volumes, London, Macmillan, 1885), Volume 3.djvu/132

Rh his extraordinary situation that, in so far as I could read his deeply brooding face, he seemed—half contemptuously—to have forgiven me. He gave me a glance occasionally, as he passed me, in which a kind of dumb desire for help appeared to struggle with the conviction that such a one as I would never even understand him. I was willing enough to help him, but the case was exceedingly delicate, and I wished to master the symptoms. Meanwhile, I worked and waited and wondered. Ah! I wondered, you may be sure, with an interminable wonder, and, turn it over as I would, I couldn't get used to my idea. Sometimes it offered itself to me with a perverse fascination which deprived me of all wish to interfere. The Count took the form of a precious psychological study, and refined feeling seemed to dictate a tender respect for his delusion. I envied him the force of his imagination, and I used sometimed to close my eyes with a vague desire that when I opened them I might find Apollo under the opposite tree, lazily kissing his flute, or see Diana hurrying with long steps down the ilex-walk. But for the most part my host seemed to me simply an unhappy young man, with a morbit mental twist which ought to be smoothed away as speedily as possible. If the remedy was to match the disease, however, it would have to be an extraordinary dose!

One evening, having bidden my god-daughter good-night, I started on my usual walk to my lodgings in the Corso. Five minutes after leaving the villa-gate I discovered that I had left my