names--and dates and places. Old women
like 'Cina never can give those names and dates and places. They do
not know if it was ten or twenty or fifty years ago, nor if the man
were Austrian or English, or the woman Italian or French or Spanish.
Pin them down, and they begin to make excuses. But I don't know why we
discuss it--it is not very interesting, even if it is true.
Nevertheless, and because you seem offended, Rafaello, and I merely
want to show you that I am right, I will cheerfully give a good
English sovereign to you or Lippo or the old woman herself, if she can
so much as tell you the name of this famous nun and the name of her
seducer. You will find she cannot, and then, since I am willing to
wager something, you must take me for a fishing-trip free a whole day,
in the _felucca_. Is it a bargain?"

His teeth gleamed as he swore it was a bargain and I watched him
bustle off from the quay with an excitement I had not felt since my
recovery. What would he discover--for that he would discover something
I did not doubt. What was Margarita's mother? Some fisher girl, whose
father had won an English lady's-maid with his flashing smile? Some
little shopkeeper's daughter? Child, perhaps, of some sprig of
nobility, caught by a pair of cool, grey English eyes? I did not know,
but I felt certain that the old 'Cina did.

I cannot linger too long over this part of my story, drawn out already
far beyond my idle scheme, and enough is said when I tell you that the
name brought me by the childishly triumphant Rafaello opened my eyes
and pursed my lips into an amazed whistle.

Our little Margarita! Here was something to startle even steady old
Roger. Only a few names in Italy are worthy to stand beside the
splendid if impoverished House forced by pride to place its unwedded
(because undowered) daughter in the convent that needs no _dot_.
Obscure in financial realms alone, it required little search to put my
finger on the epitaph of that brother of the cruel letter (a Cardinal
before his death), on the father's pictured cruel face--he scorned to
eat with the mushroom Romanoffs!--on the carved door-posts where
Emperors had entered in the great Italian days, even on the gorgeous
sculptured mantel-piece sold by Margarita's grandfather, an impetuous
younger brother at the time of his mad marriage with an English
beauty, whirled from the stage, whose brightest ornament contemporary
record believed she was destined to become, had