A young woman in Genoa is being proposed to, watched anxiously by her brother. Engraving by S. Davenport after S.J.E. Jones.

The young woman in the story is Bianca Monti, of Genoa, The man kneeling is supposed to be Signor Alonso Voarino, a jeweller who persuades her brother Giovanni Monti to give him his sister's hand in marriage in exchange for forgiveness of a gambling debt. Giovanni is presumably the man standing in the centre. Alonso is revealed to be a swindler and robber called Bertoni, who is detected and executed. Bianca then marries an English painter called Godfrey Western, who inherits a baronetcy. The engraving seems to show Western, instead of Alonso, proposing to Bianca, presumably by mistake, as that proposal involved no sacrifice