"He is twenty-four, you little stinging-nettle," said Clarissa; "and he has been so much petted and adored by all the women of Naples that he might be a thousand."
"How horrid!" said Nancy, looking disdainfully at the unwitting back before her, at the shining black hair above the high white collar, and at the irreproachable hat sitting correctly on the top of it all.
"Oh yes, he is horrid," said Clarissa; "but how visually delectable!"
Aldo della Rocca turned his profile towards them. "I shall take you along the Monza road," he said.
"Oh," cried Clarissa, "such an ugly old road, where no one will see us."
"I am driving the horses out to-day," said her brother-in-law, "not your Paris frocks." And he turned away again, and took the road towards Monza at a spanking gait.
"Il est si spirituel!" laughed Clarissa, who bubbled over into French at the slightest provocation. The straight, white, dusty road, bordered with poplars, stretched its narrowing line before them, and the sorrels went like the wind. Suddenly, as they were nearing the first ugly-looking houses of Sesto, the driver checked suddenly, and the ladies bent forward to see why. A hundred paces before them, struggling and swaying, now on the side-walk, now almost in the middle of the road, were two women and a man. Some children standing near a door shrieked, but the struggling, scuffling group uttered no sound. Nancy stood up. The man, whose hat had fallen in the road—one could see his dishevelled hair and red face—had wrenched one arm loose from the clutch of the women, and with a quick gesture drew from his pocket something that the sun glanced on.
"He has a knife or a pistol!" gasped Nancy.
The struggling women had seen it, too, and now they shrieked, clutching and grappling with him, and screaming for help.
Nancy thrust her small, strong hands forward. "I can hold the horses," she said, and seized the reins from Della Rocca's fingers.