to see to that gentleman's needs.

I found my eyes straying often to the little party in the cool
twilight of that refectory. The man-servant was so old and
battered, and of such a dignity, that he lent a touch of intrigue
to the thing. He stood stiffly behind Madame's chair, handing
dishes with an air of great reverence--the lackey of a great
noble, if I had ever seen the type. Madame never glanced toward
me, but conversed sparingly with Cristine, while she pecked
delicately at her food. Her name ran in my head with a
tantalizing flavour of the familiar. Albani! D'Albani! It was
a name not uncommon in the Roman States, but I had never heard it
linked to a noble family. And yet I had somehow, somewhere; and
in the vain effort at recollection I had almost forgotten my
hunger. There was nothing bourgeois in the little lady. The
austere servants, the high manner of condescension, spake of a
stock used to deference, though, maybe, pitifully decayed in its
fortunes. There was a mystery in these quiet folk which tickled
my curiosity. Romance after all was not destined to fail me at
Santa Chiara.

My doings of the afternoon were of interest to me alone. Suffice
it to say that when at nightfall I found Gianbattista the trustee
of a letter. It was from Madame, written in a fine thin hand on
a delicate paper, and it invited me to wait upon the signor her
father, that evening at eight o'clock. What caught my eye was a
coronet stamped in a corner. A coronet, I say, but in truth it
was a crown, the same as surmounts the Arms Royal of England on
the sign-board of a Court tradesman. I marvelled at the ways of
foreign heraldry. Either this family of d'Albani had higher