“You are right about that business at Basle; to keep up a controversy would be to invest it with more interest for public gossip. Drop it, therefore, and the world will drop it; and take my word for it, I’ll give them something more to say of me, one of these days, than that my hair trigger was too sensitive! I’m writing this in the most romantic of spots. The moonlight is sleeping--isn’t that the conventional?--over the olive plain, and the small silvery leaves are glittering in its pale light. Up the great Alps, amongst the deep crevasses, a fitful flashing of lightning promises heat for the morrow; a nightingale sings close to my window; and through the muslin curtain of another casement I can see a figure pass and repass and even distinguish that her long hair has fallen down, and floats loosely over neck and shoulders. How pleasantly I might linger on here, ‘My duns forgetting, by my duns forgot.’ How smoothly I might float down the stream of life, without even having to pull an bar! How delightfully domestic and innocent and inglorious the whole thing! Isn’t it tempting, you dog? Does it not touch even _your_ temperament through its thick hide of worldliness? And I believe in my heart it is all feasible, all to be done.
“I have just tossed up for it Head for India, and head it is! So that Loyd is booked for a pleasant journey, and I start to-morrow, to ensure him all the happiness in my power to confer. For the present, it would be as well to tell all anxious and inquiring friends, into which category come tailors, bootmakers, jewellers, &c., that it will be a postal economy not to address Mr. Harry Calvert in any European capital, and to let the ‘bills lie on the table,’ and be read this day six years, but add that if properly treated by fortune, I mean to acquit my debts to them one of these days.
“That I ‘wish they may get it’ is, therefore, no scornful or derisive hope of your friend,
“If--not a likely matter--anything occurs worth mention, you shall have a line from me from Venice.”
“When he had concluded his letter, he extinguished his candles, and sat down at the open window. The moon had gone down, and, though star-lit, the night was dark. The window in the other wing of the villa, at which he had seen the figure through the curtain, was now thrown open, and he could see that Florence, with a shawl wrapped round her, was leaning out, and talking to some one in the garden underneath.