Will was explaining, with genuine feeling, his sense of the honour thus paid him, when the Admiral spied the Prince and his sister in their friendly colloquy with him, and stepped forward to speak to the former. It fired the Admiral’s generous soul to see the handsome terms upon which the combatants of the duel he had frustrated were with each other.
“Your Highness,” he said, “will you and the Princess do me the honour of taking breakfast on the flagship, when I return from Caserta, and meeting the General? A small affair—not a reception of Her Majesty by the British Admiral. My Lady here will receive the ladies; we have a raree to show you—the little bird which flew on board just before my late battle, stayed with us all through the action, and is now free of my cabin. She eats in the prettiest way from my table, and is, I take it, the most potent and companionable familiar in the whole history of magic.”
The Prince expressed his thanks with elaborate Italian politeness and Southern warmth. It was the first time he had spoken with the Admiral since that memorable night in the Palazzo Mont’ alti; and being a man of high courage, and the last of a martial Norman race, the glory of the Admiral’s great deeds appealed with unusual strength to his imagination.
As the Prince of Favara advanced to meet the Admiral, his sister’s face was full of mischievous laughter. She had in truth created rather a difficult position for herself, and the best way out of it was to consider Will discomfited, which in truth he was, though events jumped so well with his wishes.
“Well, Signor W-Will, did I not tell you?”
“No, I don’t think you did.”
“Well, I meant to tell you, and you knew I knew, and do not look so frightened. I do not expect you to propose marriage to me this very minute, or even to carry me off for a midnight walk; but I am tired—yes, tired of our desperate Sicilian custom of all the ladies standing round that dais at one end of the room, as there, with Her Majesty and all the gentlemen round the dais at the other end, as there—where you see the Duke, the Prince, the three Counts, and the Ministers. You English take the centre of the floor. You do not have customs like we do, which can only be cheated by intrigues.”
“Is it very dreadful of you to be standing here?”
“Yes, very dreadful; but not so dreadful as it would be if my brother, who is my only protector, were not here. And I am going to rebel, and take English leave.”
“But if you were English you would go to places with a married lady friend; and when you arrived you would leave her, and never find her again until you wished to escape from somebody or to go home. Perhaps the Ambassador’s wife?”