He had not walked above half a dozen yards upon the Embankment when he heard the sound of hurrying footsteps behind him, and an ungloved hand was thrust through his arm, and a joyous voice exclaimed breathlessly, “At last! You were going to see me? I thought you had forgotten us altogether.”
“That was very wrong of you, Signora,” he answered, gently disengaging himself from the olive-complexioned hand, plump and tapering, albeit somewhat broad—such a hand as Titian painted by the score, perhaps, before he began to paint Cardinal Princes and great ladies.
He did not want to walk along the Chelsea Embankment, in the broad glare of day, with the Venetian hanging affectionately upon him. That kind of thing might pass on the Lido, or in the Royal Garden by the canal, but here the local colour was wanting.
“It is ages since you have been near us,” protested Fiordelisa, poutingly. “I am sure you must have forgotten us.”
“Not I, Signora. Englishmen don’t forget their friends so easily. I have been in the country till—till quite lately. And you—tell me how you have been getting on with your singing-master.”
“He shall tell you,” cried Fiordelisa, flashing one of her brightest looks upon him. “He pretends to be monstrously pleased with me. He declares that in a few months, perhaps even sooner, he will get me an engagement at one of the small theatres, to sing in a comic opera. They will give me ever so much more money than I am earning at Coveny Gardeny.”
The Venetian often put a superfluous vowel at the end of a word, not yet having mastered our severe terminal consonants. “The maestro is to have some of the money for his trouble, but that is fair, is it not?”
“Fair that he should take a small percentage, perhaps, but not more.”
“A percentage? What is that?”
Vansittart explained.