“That is very good advice, but to follow it isn’t amusing.” Then the Prince added, “You alluded, just now, as to something particular, to quel giovane, the young artisan whom I met in the other house. Is he also estimable, or has he paid the penalty of his crimes?”
“He has paid the penalty, but I don’t know of what. I have nothing bad to tell you of him, except that I think his star is on the wane.”
“Poverino!” the Prince exclaimed.
“That is exactly the manner in which I addressed him the first time I saw him. I didn’t know how it would happen, but I felt that it would happen somehow. It has happened through his changing his opinions. He has now the same idea as you—that ci vuol’ pazienza.”
The Prince listened with the same expression of wounded eagerness, the same parted lips and excited eyes, to every added fact that dropped from Madame Grandoni’s lips. “That, at least, is more honest. Then he doesn’t go to Chiffinch Street?”
“I don’t know about Chiffinch Street; but it would be my impression that he doesn’t go anywhere that Christina and the other one—the Scotchman—go together. But these are delicate matters,” the old woman pursued.
They seemed much to interest her interlocutor. “Do you mean that the Scotchman is—what shall I call it?—his successor?”
For a moment Madame Grandoni made no reply. “I think that this case is different. But I don’t understand; it was the other, the little one, that helped her to know the Scotchman.”
“And now they have quarrelled—about my wife? It is all tremendously edifying!” the Prince exclaimed.
“I can’t tell you, and shouldn’t have attempted it, only that Assunta talks to me.”