"Must you?" cried Miss Sandus. "Are n't you dying to see him?"
"Yes," Susanna confessed, with a flutter of laughter. "I 'm dying to see him. But I 'm so afraid."
"I 'll disappear," said Miss Sandus, rising. "Then the good Father can bring him to you."
"Oh, don't—don't leave me," Susanna begged, stretching out her hand.
"My dear!" laughed Miss Sandus, and she tripped off towards the Palace.
"Well, Father," Susanna said, after a pause, "will you show him the way?"
The loggia, as Father Angelo called it, where he had left Anthony, while he went to announce his arrival, was the same long open colonnade in which, that morning, Susanna had had her conference with Commendatore Fregi. It was arranged as a sort of out-of-doors living-room. There were rugs on the marble pavement, and chairs and tables; and on the tables, besides vases with flowers, and other things, there were a good many books.
Absently, mechanically, (as one will when one is waiting in a strange place where books are within reach), Anthony picked a book up. It was an old, small book, in tree-calf, stamped, in the midst of much elaborate gold tooling, with the Valdeschi arms and coronet. Half-consciously examining it, he became aware presently that it was a volume of the poems of Ronsard. And then somehow it fell open, at a page that was marked by the insertion of an empty envelope.
The envelope caught Anthony's eye, and held it; and that was scarcely to be wondered at, for, in his own unmistakable handwriting, it was addressed to Madame Torrebianca, at the New Manor, Craford, England, and its upper corner bore an uncancelled twenty-five centime Italian postage-stamp.
On the page the envelope marked was printed the sonnet, "Voicy le Bois."