"So you settled on that beautiful coast? I wonder if that was the winter I first saw Italy?"
He named the year.
"Yes--that was the year," said Diana. "Had you never seen Italy before that?" She looked at him in a little surprise.
"Do I seem to you so old?" said Sir James, smiling. "I had been a very busy man, Miss Mallory, and my holidays had been generally spent in Ireland. But that year"--he paused a moment--"that year I had been ill, and the doctors sent me abroad--in October," he added, slowly and precisely. "I went first to Paris, and I was at Genoa in November."
"We must have been there--just about then! Mamma died in October. And I remember the winter was just beginning at Genoa--it was very cold--and I got bronchitis--I was only a little thing."
"And Oliver tells me you found a home at Portofino?"
Diana replied. He kept her talking; yet her impression was that he did not listen very much to what she said. At the same time she felt herself studied, in a way which made her self-conscious, which perhaps she might have resented in any man less polished and less courteous.
"Pardon me--" he said, abruptly, at a pause in the conversation. "Your name interests me particularly. It is Welsh, is it not? I knew two or three persons of that name; and they were Welsh."
Diana's look changed a little.
"Yes, it is Welsh," she said, in a hesitating, reserved voice; and then looked round her as though in search of a change of topic.