“Tell her she ought,” Teresa broke in drearily. “Sylvia is so good, she will do anything she thinks she ought. Why is it the good people who always have to suffer? Little Sylvia! And I meant her to be so happy! Granny, be very, very kind to her. Must it be to-day?”
“No,” said Mrs Brodrick, considering. “Let us wait a day.”
“Till Monday.”
“Well—till Monday. Perhaps he will speak. Perhaps something will come to her. Do you think that man was really Cesare?”
“What do I care if it was?”
But in spite of her indifference her grandmother, without mentioning the incident, asked Mrs Maxwell whether Peppina’s lover was in Taormina.
“I wonder?” returned Mrs Maxwell meditatively. “She broke a scent bottle this morning—I believe he is.”
Peppina, however, asked casually where her lover now was, swore with so much detail that her Cesare, poor fellow, was in Rome, working on the Avanti staff; that her sister had seen him the day before and had heard from him how he had been obliged to have the doctor for Angelo, the poor cripple, and the doctor had said it was good broth the creature wanted—but how could Cesare, with his wages, get good broth?—that Mrs Maxwell melted into conviction and five lire.
No one thought of asking Nina, and no one except she was aware that on that same night Peppina was leaning over a wall, under a golden moon, talking to a man whose movements were very like those of Cesare. She was pressing something into his hand.
“Diamine,” she was saying, “and why not, when I tell you I have more than I want?”