“Well, well, let us see what is going on,” said he, with all his usual energy, “in the next room.”
While this colloquy was going on, Diana, raising her eyes by chance, had been suddenly caught by a resemblance, real or imaginary, between the portrait opposite to her and the man who stood immediately beneath. Having been once aroused, she looked again at Pandolfini, in whom she had taken a passing interest as the possible lover of Sophy, but whom she had ceased to notice for some time back. And he felt her eyes upon him, felt that she was at last looking at him fairly, her interest awakened—and his heart began to beat. He felt, too, that they were alone, though the others were so near. It was the first time they had really been brought face to face.
“Mr. Pandolfini,” said Diana, at last, “I wonder if it is only a trick of the light or of my eyes, but I seem to see a resemblance between you and the Vandyke. Has it never been noticed before?”
He turned to her instantly, with a smile which lighted up his face like a sunbeam—a sudden, sweet, ingratiating, Italian smile—trying hard to keep the tremulous eagerness of response down, and look as calm as she did. “I do not remember,” he said, in his slow and elaborate English; “but it would not be wonderful. My mother was dei Sogni—of the house of the Dreams,” he repeated, with some humour in his smile.
Diana was dazzled by the look he gave her. It is the only word to use. It was not the ordinary smile, but a lighting up of the whole man, face and soul. “Indeed!” she said, ashamed of the commonplace word. “Then I may believe I am right. I did not know there was any relationship, so it was clever on my part. But if you belong to the race, Mr. Pandolfini, what poor intruders you must feel us all to be! Invaders, Goths, Forestieri—that means something like barbarians, does it not?”
“Perhaps—in the ancient days,” he said; “but now it has another signification. What was that anecdote which finds itself in all your histories?—Anglorum, Angelorum.”
“Ah, we are but a poor kind of angels nowadays,” said Diana; “black often, not white, I fear; and when we rush over your beautiful places, and crowd your palaces—like this—you must be forbearing indeed, to think well of us. I feel myself an interloper when I look at your ancestor: he is the master of the house, not I.”
“That is—pardon me,” said the Italian, “because the Signora Diana is of the house of the dreams too.”
Diana looked up at him surprised. She was half offended too, with the idea of a certain presumption in the stranger who ventured to use her Christian name on such short acquaintance. But Pandolfini’s anxious respectfulness was not to be doubted, and she remembered in time that it was the Italian custom. Besides, Diana was but human, and to be addressed in this tone of reverential devotion touched her somewhat. “You mean of the house of the dreamers, I suppose. I have nothing to say against it. I suppose it is true.”
Then there was a momentary pause. Pandolfini, like other men, was absorbed and struck dumb, when the moment he had looked forward to, the moment when he could speak to her and recommend himself, really came. His mind was full of a hundred things, and yet he could not think of one to say.