"The serpent!" she ejaculated as she pressed her handkerchief to her streaming eyes.
Not one word did Mrs. Dodd utter for many days to her husband of her momentous conversation with the squire. In a statuesque attitude, she sat, like Marius on the ruins of Carthage, or Patience on a monument smiling at grief.
And then she thought with horror of the confidence she had made to old Mrs. Wurzel and the brewer's daughter, not an hour before. _On a tiré le vin, il faut payer la bouteille._
The party had been in Rome three weeks, they had all thoroughly enjoyed themselves, and Georgie Haggard had made no objection whatever to her husband's putting in an appearance at the Ballo Papayani. The great Carnival ball had been for years one of the sights of Rome. Although the red English guide-book merely discreetly remarked that "the scene at Papayani's at Carnival time should on no account be missed," Baedeker and the other foreign mentors devoted whole pages to glowing descriptions of these more than Olympian revels.
An Italian, as a rule, in Carnival time is like an English boy on the fifth of November--he is not happy unless he dresses up. In this country, we are apt to think when any one dresses himself up, that he is disguising a fool. In Italy, on the contrary, all the world is continually occupied in masquerading in some way or other. Costume balls, in all classes of society, are favourite entertainments. Historical masques, though not got up with the elaborate attention to minute detail which is bestowed upon them by the thoughtful beer-drinking and sausage-devouring German, are yet of very frequent occurrence. Every city, every town, nay every hamlet, in Italy, has its long and glorious history, often written in letters of blood, always deeply engraven on the hearts of the people. The mementoes of a bygone time are cherished by the Italians. Consequently, dressing up in Italy is universal, and even the man who dines upon a penny roll and a quarter of a melon, can afford five centessimi, or one halfpenny, for a paper nose, and it costs him nothing to flour his face and hair.
Let us take an instance. Ivrea is a little place, a small garrison town, celebrated for its coolness and its cheapness; thither the Piedmontese flock in crowds when the heat of the city is no longer bearable. There is nothing remarkable about the place; it has its opera house, at which ambitious young ladies, principally English and Americans, pupils of the Conservatorio at Milan, make their _débuts_. Happy garrison, happy sojourners in the little Italian town; they are provided with a succession of interesting, though perhaps undeveloped, prima donnas, who make their little successes or their tiny fiascoes at this nursery of Art. But Ivrea, like all the other Italian towns, has its history, its glorious legend, which is never allowed to die, and the Carnival of Ivrea is the time chosen for representing the story and commemorating the tragic history of the local heroine. In the Middle Ages, Ivrea had its feudal lord. The Count Arduino, as may be fancied from his name, was a bold, bad man; he possessed the terrible _Droit de Seigneur_, which he rigorously exacted. The belle of the village was a miller's daughter: