“Oh, he is going off to-morrow? Then I suppose you have been honest, and given him his congé at last?”
“I honest? I did not know I had ever been accused of picking and stealing. If he had asked me for his congé, he should have had it long ago. He has been sent for, it seems.”
“Then has the congé not yet been asked for? In that case we shall have him back again, I suppose?” said her father, in a tone of resignation, and with a shrug of his shoulders.
“No; for his people will be away. They are going to Switzerland, and the Durants are going to Homburg. Where do you mean to go, when it is too hot to stay here?”
He looked at her half angrily for a moment. “It is never too hot to stay here,” he said; then, after a pause, “We can move higher up among the hills.”
“Where one will never see a soul—worse even than here!”
“Oh, you will see plenty of country-folk,” he said—“a fine race of people, mountaineers, yet husbandmen, which is a rare combination.”
Constance looked up at him with a little moue of mingled despair and disdain.
“With perhaps some romantic young Italian count for you to practise upon,” he said.
Though the humour on his part was grim and derisive rather than sympathetic, her countenance cleared a little. “You know, papa,” she said, with a faintly complaining note, “that my Italian is very limited, and your counts and countesses speak no language but their own.”