“So much the better!” exclaimed Beppo. “You may laugh, mamma, but I am really and truly mad about her! Would that I were a millionaire, leading her penniless to the altar! Then would I scatter diamonds and pearls, rubies and emeralds, before her feet!”
His mother laughed. She could not help feeling a little twinge of jealousy, but still, she was becoming really very fond of Lily Fairfield.
Countess Polda, like so many people, was always apt to admire what belonged to herself, and she now regarded the English girl as being practically her daughter-in-law.
Even so, she noticed uneasily that Beppo was not making much way with Lily, and now and again there would come a moment of discomfort and doubt, when she would ask herself, with real uneasiness, whether the girl and Angus Stuart were in correspondence? There had certainly been no harm in the rather formal, dull letters the young man had written to Lily from Milan during the early days of their acquaintance. But Countess Polda did not consider it at all proper that a girl should be receiving letters from a member of the other sex. It seemed to her unfitting and unnecessary.
Twice, while Lily had been out with Beppo, the Countess had searched her room very thoroughly in order to discover whether there were any new letters there from Angus Stuart. She had found nothing but a couple of notes—one from a friend of Emmeline Fairfield, the other from a girl who had evidently been at school with her correspondent.
And so the days went by very quickly for all the inmates of La Solitude, until one day, at luncheon, Beppo suddenly exclaimed regretfully that a great Paris financier with whom he was in touch was to be in Rome four or five days from now, and that it was important he should see this man.
“I have sent off a telegram to find out exactly when he will be there,” he said. “I do not mean to be long away, mamma!”
The Countess saw a look of surprise, and not altogether one of pleased surprise, pass over Lily’s face, and that look disturbed the older woman. Did Lily regret the probable quick return of Beppo?
The anxious mother began to wish ardently that something might be settled between the young people before Beppo left. Drawing her son aside, after luncheon was finished, she said, a little nervously: “I hope you are not going too slow, my boy. You do not seem to me to be making very much way with our dear little friend.”
But he said: “Leave it to me, mamma. I will choose the right moment! Do not interfere.”