whom I could rely, might be the fittest person
to help me. The first man whom I thought of,
under these circumstances, was also the only
Italian with whom I was intimately acquainted
—my quaint little friend, Professor Pesca.

The Professor has been so long absent from
these pages, that he has run some risk of being
forgotten altogether. It is the necessary law
of such a story as mine, that the persons
concerned in it only appear when the course of
events takes them up—they come and go, not
by favour of my personal partiality, but by right
of their direct connexion with the circumstances
to be detailed. For this reason, not Pesca only,
but my mother and sister as well, have been left
far in the background of the narrative. My
visits to the Hampstead cottage; my mother's
lamentable belief in the denial of Laura's
identity which the conspiracy had accomplished;
my vain efforts to overcome the prejudice, on
her part and on my sister's, to which, in their
jealous affection for me, they both continued to
adhere; the painful necessity which that
prejudice imposed on me of concealing my marriage
from them till they had learnt to do justice to
my wife—all these little domestic occurrences
have been left unrecorded, because they were not
essential to the main interest of the story. It is
nothing that they added to my anxieties and
embittered my disappointments—the steady
march of events has inexorably passed them by.

For the same reason, I have said nothing,
here, of the consolation that I found in Pesca's
brotherly affection for me, when I saw him again
after the sudden cessation of my residence at
Limmeridge House. I have not recorded the
fidelity with which my warm-hearted little friend
followed me to the place of embarkation, when I
sailed for Central America, or the noisy transport
of joy with which he received me when we next
met in London. If I had felt justified in accepting
the offers of service which he made to me, on
my return, he would have appeared again, long
ere this. But, though I knew that his honour
and his courage were to be implicitly relied on,
I was not so sure that his discretion was to be
trusted; and, for that reason only, I followed
the course of all my inquiries alone. It will now
be sufficiently understood that Pesca was not
separated from all connexion with me and my
interests, although he has hitherto been
separated from all connexion with the progress of
this narrative. He was as true and as ready a
friend of mine still, as ever he had been in his
life.

Before I summoned Pesca to my assistance,
it was necessary to see for myself what sort of
man I had to deal with. Up to this time, I had
never once set eyes on Count Fosco.

Three days after my return with Laura and
Marian to London, I set forth alone for Forest-
road, St. John's Wood, between ten and eleven
o'clock in the morning. It was a fine day—I
had some hours to spare—and I thought it likely,
if I waited a little for him, that the Count might
be tempted out. I had no great reason to fear
the chance of his recognising me in the
daytime, for the only occasion when I had been seen
by him was the occasion on which he had
followed me home at night.

No one appeared at the windows in the front
of the house. I walked down a turning which
ran past the side of it, and looked over the low
garden wall. One of the back windows on the
lower floor was thrown up, and a net was
stretched across the opening. I saw nobody;
but I heard, in the room, first a shrill whistling
and singing of birds—then, the deep ringing
voice which Marian's description had made
familiar to me. "Come out on my little finger,
my pret-pret-pretties!" cried the voice. "Come
out, and hop up-stairs! One, two, three—and
up! Three, two, one—and down! One, two,
three—twit-twit-twit-tweet!" The Count was
exercising his canaries, as he used to exercise
them in Marian's time, at Blackwater Park.

I waited a little while, and the singing and
the whistling ceased. "Come, kiss me, my
pretties!" said the deep voice. There was a
responsive twittering and chirping—a low, oily
laugh—a silence of a minute or so—and then I
heard the opening of the house door. I turned,
and retraced my steps. The magnificent melody
of the Prayer in Rossini's "Moses," sung in
a sonorous bass voice, rose grandly through the
suburban silence of the place. The front garden
gate opened and closed. The Count had come
out.

He crossed the road, and walked towards the
western boundary of the Regent's Park. I kept
on my own side of the way, a little behind him,
and walked in that direction also.

Marian had prepared me for his high stature,
his monstrous corpulence, and his ostentatious
mourning garments—but not for the horrible
freshness and cheerfulness and vitality of the
man. He carried his sixty years as if they had
been fewer than forty. He sauntered along, wearing
his hat a little on one side, with a light jaunty
step; swinging his big stick; humming to
himself; looking up, from time to time, at the
houses and gardens on either side of him, with
superb, smiling patronage. If a stranger had been
torn that the whole neighbourhood belonged to
him, that stranger would not have been surprised
to hear it. He never looked back: he paid no
apparent attention to me, no apparent attention
to any one who passed him on his own side of
the road—except, now and then, when he smiled
and smirked, with an easy, paternal good humour,
at the nurserymaids and the children whom he
met. In this way, he led me on, till we reached
a colony of shops outside the western terraces
of the Park.

Here, he stopped at a pastrycook's, went in
(probably to give an order), and came out again
immediately with a tart in his hand. An Italian
was grinding an organ before the shop, and a
miserable little shrivelled monkey was sitting on
the instrument. The Count stopped; bit a piece
for himself out of the tart; and gravely handed
the rest to the monkey. "My poor little man!"