didn't think, when I left home that I was going to be talking this way
to princesses. I never dreamed they were like you; and you talk
beautiful English, too."

With a warm impulse the princess laid her left hand over the
cotton-gloved one in her right.

"Ah, but I was an American myself," she said, "and it does me good to
see a country-woman."

They parted. Again the guide made a deep reverence to "Her Excellency,"
but to Nina the look in his eyes seemed both sly and suspicious.

In the meantime, the pony-cart carrying the prince and his brother was
jogging slowly up the hills from the station.

Don Giovanni Sansevero--by his own title the Marchese di Valdo--was
still on the hither side of thirty, but if a reputation for being
"irresistible to women" goes for anything, he must by this time have
had some experience in their ways. At all events, his appearance so
tallied with hearsay that, whether founded upon fact or not, the
reputation remained.

He was supple and beautifully built, his bones were small and finely
jointed, his features chiseled with classic regularity--later on his
lips might grow coarse, but as yet they were merely full. The chief
characteristic of his expression was its mobility, but it was the
mobility of an actor who knows every emotion that the muscles of a face
can command. Sansevero's face, also changeable as an April day, was the
spontaneous expression of unconscious mood. Giovanni was of a type to