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
smile sweetly when most angry, or to assume an air of sulkiness when at
heart he might be well content. Just now, with an assumption of extreme
indifference, he turned to his brother.

"What is she like, this heiress of yours whom you are so anxious to have
me marry?" he asked. "Plain, stupid, a nonentity?--So much the
better--those make the easy wives to manage. Give me a woman with little
real success--I mean, one who has seen only the imitation fire that is
lighted when man pursues with reason and not with feeling. The American
men make it easy for the rest of us--they are what you call curtain
raisers in the play of love. They keep the gallery busy until the
entrance of the hero. I hope she is not a beauty."

"_Per Bacco_, how you do talk!" interrupted the prince. "I have no
chance to answer. Miss Randolph is not a beauty; but she is
_simpatica_; she has an air, a _chic_."

"So much the better, so long as the _chic_ is one of appearance and not
of personality. I don't want my wife to be a siren." Suddenly he laughed
and hit his brother's knee. "But what nonsense! Imagine a cold American
miss having the power to make a man's pulses leap! Oh, don't make a face
like that--I am not speaking of my honored sister-in-law; she is indeed
of the true type of our mother." Mec