Not long since, I was one among a crowd of nobodies at a big official reception in
Paris when the Marchese and Marchesa di San Silvestro were announced. There
was a momentary hush; those about the doorway fell back to let this
distinguished couple pass, and some of us stood on tiptoe to get a glimpse of
them; for San Silvestro is a man of no small importance in the political and
diplomatic world, and his wife enjoys quite a European fame for beauty and
amiability, having had opportunities of displaying both these attractive gifts at the
several courts where she has acted as Italian ambassadress. They made their
way quickly up the long room,—she short, rather sallow, inclined toward
embonpoint, but with eyes whose magnificence was rivalled only by that of her
diamonds; he bald-headed, fat, gray-haired, covered with orders,—and were
soon out of sight. I followed them with a sigh which caused my neighbour to ask
me jocosely whether the marchesa was an old flame of mine.
"Far from it," I answered. "Only the sight of her reminded me of bygone days.
Dear, dear me! how time does slip on! It is fifteen years since I saw her last."
I moved away, looking down rather ruefully at the waistcoat to whose
circumference fifteen years have made no trifling addition, and wondering
whether I was really as much altered and aged in appearance as the marchesa
was.
Fifteen years—it is no such very long time; and yet I dare say that the persons
principally concerned in the incident which I am about to relate have given up
thinking about it as completely as I had done, until the sound of that lady's name,
and the sight of her big black eyes, recalled it to me, and set me thinking of the
sunny spring afternoon on which my sister Anne and I journeyed from Verona to
Venice, and of her naive exclamations of delight on finding herself in a real
gondola, gliding smoothly down the Grand Canal. My sister Anne is by some
years my senior. She is what might be called an old lady now, and she certainly
was an old maid then, and had long accepted her position as such. Then, as
now, she habitually wore a gray alpaca gown, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles,
gloves a couple of sizes too large for her, and a shapeless, broad-leaved straw
hat, from which a blue veil was flung back and streamed out in the breeze behind
her, like a ship's ensign. Then, as now, she was the simplest, the most kind-
hearted, the most prejudiced of mortals; an enthusiastic admirer of the arts, and
given, as her own small contribution thereto, to the production of endless water-
colour landscapes, a trifle woolly, indeed, as to outline, and somewhat faulty as
to perspective, but warm in colouring, and highly thought of in the family. I
believe, in fact, that it was chiefly with a view to the filling of her portfolio that she
had persuaded me to take her to Venice; and, as I am constitutionally indolent, I
