“Poverino!” the Prince exclaimed.
“That’s 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 it would happen somehow. It has happened through his changing his opinions. He has now the same idea as you—ci vuol pazienza.”
Her friend 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, though it would be my impression that he doesn’t go to any place visited by Christina and the other one, by the Scotchman, together. But these are delicate matters,” the old woman pursued.
They seemed much to impress her interlocutor. “Do you mean that the Scotchman is—what shall I call it?—his successor?”
For a time she made no reply. “I imagine this case different. But I don’t understand; it was the other, the little one, who helped her to know the Scotchman.”
“And now they’ve quarrelled—about my wife? It’s all tremendously edifying!” the Prince wailed.
“I can’t tell you, and shouldn’t have attempted it, only that Assunta talks to me.”
“I wish she would talk to me,” he said wistfully.
“Ah my friend, if Christina were to find you getting at her servants——!”