CHAPTER XIX
The undertaking which Urania had given was so vague, however, that Cornélie felt uneasy and spoke of it to Duco that evening, when she met him at the restaurant. But he was not interested in Urania, in what she did or didn't do; and he shrugged his shoulders indifferently. Cornélie, on the other hand, was silent and absent-minded and did not listen to what he was talking about: a side-panel of a triptych, undoubtedly by Lippo Memmi, which he had discovered in a little shop by the Tiber; the angel of the Annunciation, almost as beautiful as the one in the Uffizi, kneeling with the stir of his last flight yet about him, with the lily-stem in his hands. But the dealer asked two hundred lire for it and he did not want to give more than fifty. And yet the dealer had not mentioned Memmi's name, did not suspect that the angel was by Memmi.
Cornélie was not listening; and suddenly she said: "I am going to the Palazzo Ruspoli."
He looked up in surprise:
"What for?"
"To ask for Miss Hope."
He was dumb with amazement and stared at her open-mouthed.
"If she's not there," Cornélie went on, "it's all right. If she is, if she has gone after all, I'll ask to speak to her on urgent business."
He did not know what to say, thinking her sudden idea so strange, so eccentric, thinking it so unnecessary that her curve should cross the curves of insignificant, indifferent people, that he did not know how to choose his words. Cornélie glanced at her watch: