Following up this train of thought, she smiled sweetly at McTaggart.
"You could not spare me one week now?—a little week before you return ...? At Fiesole—just think again. To abandon your poor aunt at once—one sees you do not care for her! ... Just seven days, Pietro mio, to leave me happily settled there?"
She drew back her veil and her velvet eyes, like darkest pansies, pleaded mutely. McTaggart summoned all his strength, conjuring up Cydonia.
"Please don't make it any harder! I'd love to come, you know that. It's not every day in one's life one ... inherits such a perfect aunt!"
He smiled at her with real affection.
"I'll come back when you're at Rome—(and not alone!" he said to himself). "But I'm bound to return to England first and settle up my business there."
"You talk as if you kept a shop!" She shrugged her shoulders pettishly. "What does the Marquis Maramonte want with commissions on the 'Bourse'?"
He laughed outright with the memory of her disgusted, lovely face when he had told her of his profession.
"Fi donc!" Mischievous, she shook a slender finger at him. "It would make poor Gino turn in his grave."
"And serve him right!" was McTaggart's thought. He could not forgive the dead man for his heartless treatment of his sister. He had the Italian's centuries-deep love of justice and liberty and was not without a strain of revenge, the lingering trace of some far-off "Vendetta."