My Friend Prospero Part 10

"Given the hour and the place, I wonder whether I ought to bow," he thought.

Before he could make up his mind, however, his hand had automatically raised his hat.

She inclined her head in acknowledgment, and something softly changed in her face.

"She smiled!" he said, and caught his breath, with a kind of astonished exultancy.

That soft change in her face came and went and came again through all his dreams.

PART THIRD

I

"Good morning, Prospero," said Annunziata.

"Good morning, Wide-awake," responded John.

He was in the octagonal room on the _piano n.o.bile_ of the castle, where his lost ladies of old years smiled on him from their frames. He had heard an approaching patter of feet on the pavement of the room beyond; and then Annunziata's little grey figure, white face, and big grave eyes, had appeared, one picture the more, in the vast carved and gilded doorway.

"I have been looking everywhere for you," she said, plaintive.

"Poor sweetheart," he commiserated her. "And can't you find me?"

"I couldn't," said Annunziata, bearing on the tense. "But I have found you _now_."

"Oh? Have you? Where?" asked he.

"_Where?_" cried she, with a disdainful movement. "But _here_, of course."

"I wouldn't be too c.o.c.ksure of that," he cautioned her. "_Here_ is a mighty evasive bird. For, suppose we were elsewhere, then _there_ would be here, and here would be somewhere else."

"No," said Annunziata, with resolution. "Where a person is, that is always _here_."

"You speak as if a person carried his here with him, like his hat," said John.

"Yes, that is how it is," said Annunziata, nodding.

"You have a remarkably solid little head,--for all its curls, there's no confusing it," said he. "Well, have you your report, drawn up, signed, sealed, sworn to before a Commissioner for Oaths, and ready to be delivered?"

"My report--?" questioned Annunziata, with a glance.

"About the Form," said John. "I caught you yesterday red-handed in the fact of pumping it."

"Yes," said Annunziata. "Her name is Maria Dolores."

"A most becoming name," said he.

"She is very nice," said Annunziata.

"She looks very nice," said he.

"She is twenty-two years and ten months old," continued his informant.

"Fancy. As middle-aged as that," commented he.

"Yes. She is an Austrian."

"Ah."

"And as I told you, she is visiting the Signora Brandi. Only, she calls her Frao Branta."

"Frao Branta?" John turned the name on his tongue. "Branta? Branta?"

What familiar German name, at the back of his memory, did it half evoke?

Suddenly he had a flash. "Can you possibly mean Frau Brandt?"

Annunziata gave a gesture of affirmation.

"Yes, that is it," she said. "You sound it just as she did!"

"I see," said John. "And Brandt, if there are degrees of unbirth, is even more furiously unborn than Brandi."

"Unborn--?" said Annunziata, frowning.

"Not n.o.ble--not of the aristocracy," John explained.

"Very few people are n.o.ble," said Annunziata.

"All the more reason, then, why you and I should be thankful that we are," said he.

"You and I?" she expostulated, with a shrug of her little grey shoulders. "_Mache!_ We are not n.o.ble."

"Aren't we? How do you know?" asked John. "Anyhow," he impressively moralized, "we can try to be."

"No," said she, with conclusiveness, with fatalism. "It is no good trying. Either you are n.o.ble or simple,--G.o.d makes you so,--you cannot help it. If I were n.o.ble, I should be a contessina. If you were n.o.ble, you would be a gransignore.

"And my una.s.suming appearance a.s.sures you that I'm not?" said he, smiling.

"If you were a gransignore," she instructed him, "you would never be such friends with me--you would be too proud."

John laughed.

"You judge people by the company they keep. Well, I will apply the same principle of judgment to your gossip, Maria Dolores. By-the-by," he broke off to inquire, "what is her Pagan name?"