Angelo's face changed and softened. "If you want him, it is different!" he returned. "But you've seemed always to have a horror of snapshotters."
"He might take the garden," she suggested.
"Bring the fellow, Americo," said Prince Della Robbia.
The butler flushed furiously with joy. "Rightho, my good Highnesses," he exclaimed; and the three who understood why he was funny stifled laughter till he was out of earshot. "His English is a constant delight to us," said Marie, instantly picking up again her sleigh-bell gayety of manner, like a dropped, forgotten garment. "It's as wonderful as my English maid's French, which she's earnestly studying, though she finds that a language where meat is feminine and milk masculine simply doesn't appeal to her reason. She's learned to call Wednesday 'Murcreedy' and Saturday 'Samdy.' When she goes to Mentone to buy me something at Aux Dames de France, she says she's bought it at the 'Ox Daimes.' But she reached her grandest height this morning. I walked into my room, to hear her groaning at a window that looks toward Monte Carlo. 'Oh, those poor, poor men committing suicide! I can't get them out of my head,' she moaned when I asked if she were ill. 'That day when I went over there sightseeing. It was too awful, walking on the terrace, to hear those poor creatures blowing out their brains every two minutes down under the Casino. I couldn't stand it, so I had to come away, but nobody else seemed to mind, and some of 'em was hanging over the wall to see what was going on!' I couldn't imagine what she meant, for a minute. Then I knew it must be the pigeon-shooters."
Angelo laughed. "Of course. But what do you know of the pigeon-shooters, Marie mia? You have sternly refused to let me take you to Monte Carlo."
Marie blushed, a sudden bright blush. "Oh, you have told me about them—how they shoot under the terrace. That's one reason why I love staying here at Cap Martin, or taking excursions where everything is purely beautiful, and nothing to make one sad."
"I don't remember telling you about the pigeon-shooting," Angelo said.
"Well, if you didn't tell me, somebody else must have, mustn't they—else how could I know?"
"Highnesses, Mister the Stereo-Mondaine."
A frail wisp of a man was ushered by the butler on to the loggia: a man very shabby, very thin, very proud, with a camera out of proportion to his size and strength, hugged under one arm. He would have been known as a Frenchman if found dressed in furs at the North Pole.