“Of course I’ll go back, but only if you’ll tell me who this one is! How can you be ignorant, dear friend, when he comes freely in and out of the place?—where I have to watch at the door for a moment I can snatch. He wasn’t the same as the other.”
“As the other?”
“Doubtless there are fifty! I mean the little one I met in the house that Sunday afternoon.”
“I sit in my room almost always now,” said the old woman. “I only come down to eat.”
“Dear lady, it would be better if you would sit here,” the Prince returned.
“Better for whom?”
“I mean that if you didn’t withdraw yourself you could at least answer my questions.”
“Ah but I haven’t the slightest desire to answer them,” Madame Grandoni replied. “You must remember that I’m not here as your spy.”
“No,” said the Prince in a tone of extreme and simple melancholy. “If you had given me more information I shouldn’t have been obliged to come here myself. I arrived in London only this morning, and this evening I spent two hours walking up and down opposite there, like a groom waiting for his master to come back from a ride. I wanted a personal impression. It was so I saw him come in. He’s not a gentleman—not even one of the strange ones of this country.”
“I think he’s Scotch or Welsh,” Madame Grandoni explained.