"My dear, your tea is getting cold." She laid the dress on the bed, and in doing so, perceived the antique-looking book with the silver clasps which I had left there.
"What's this ?" she asked, turning it round to discover its name.
"'Letters of a Dead Musician!' What a shivery title! Is it morbid reading ?" "Not at all," I replied, as I leaned comfortably back in an easy-chair and sipped my tea.

"It is a very scholarly, poetical, and picturesque work.

Signor Cellini lent it to me; the author was a friend of his." Amy looked at me with a knowing and half-serious expression.
"Say now--take care, take care! Aren't you and Cellini getting to be rather particular friends--something a little beyond the Platonic, eh ?" This notion struck me as so absurd that I laughed heartily.

Then, without pausing for one instant to think what I was saying, I answered with amazing readiness and frankness, considering that I really knew nothing about it: "Why, my dear, Raffaello Cellini is betrothed, and he is a most devoted lover." A moment after I had uttered this assertion I was surprised at myself.
What authority had I for saying that Cellini was betrothed?
What did I know about it?
Confused, I endeavoured to find some means of retracting this unfounded and rash remark, but no words of explanation would come to my lips that had been so ready and primed to deliver what might be, for all I knew, a falsehood.

Amy did not perceive my embarrassment.