He spoke almost angrily, the more so, perhaps, on account of that strange feeling which never left him—the feeling that he was pleading his own cause and that of his dead.
"My dear friend," the professor had responded, with a slight shrug of the shoulders, "when one is young and in love, one is always in earnest—each time. Are you so old that you cannot remember? Ah, I forgot, you had no experience of such things—at least, no official experience."
Don Agostino smiled. "No," he repeated, "no official experience."
The professor glanced at him with a gleam of satirical amusement. He fancied he had detected a note of irony in the other's voice, but in his interpretation of it he was very wide of the mark.
And Don Agostino had found that the result of his conversation with Silvio's father was exactly what Silvio himself had foretold. The professor had dismissed the whole affair with airy good-humor as a pazzia, a folly in which he had so far participated as to have made formal overtures on his son's behalf for Donna Bianca Acorari's hand, and of which he did not wish to hear anything more. If Silvio thought the girl would make him a good wife, then by all means let him marry her, if he could. If he could not, there were plenty of other girls to choose from, and any one of them who married Silvio would be a great deal luckier than she most probably deserved to be.
Don Agostino had very soon come to the conclusion that the professor would place no serious obstacles in the way to hinder his son from marrying Donna Bianca Acorari, should Silvio find means to accomplish that object. During the remainder of their dinner at the Castello di Costantino he threw himself, as it were, into Professor Rossano's humor, and it soon became evident to Silvio and Giacinta that their father and his guest were mutually enjoying one another's conversation. Giacinta, indeed, was not a little astonished at hearing the professor discourse so readily with a priest. But then, as she noted the facility with which Monsignor Lelli met her father on his favorite ground, the knowledge which he displayed of the scientific and political problems of the day, the serene tolerance with which he would discuss questions which she knew to be anathema to the ecclesiastical temperament, it was at once revealed to her that this was no ordinary priest, whose mental vision was limited by the outlook of the sacristy. The professor, as the evening wore on, seemed to be in his element. From subject to subject he flew with a rapidity which would have been bewildering had it not been for the conciseness and pungency of the arguments he brought to bear upon each of them. But Monsignor Lelli met him at every turn, agreeing with him often, but often parrying his thrusts with rapier-like stabs of keenest satire. The summer twilight was already fading into dusk, and the moon was rising over the Aventine, casting long shadows from the cypress-trees over the gardens and vineyards stretching away beneath the terrace, and still the two continued their discussions.
People seated at little tables near them ceased from laughing and talking, and turned round to listen, for the waiters had whispered that the signore with the beard was the famous Senator Rossano, and that the priest was without doubt a cardinal who had dressed as an ordinary priest lest he should be compromised by being seen in public in such company.
Suddenly, in the midst of a more than usually brilliant sally, provoked by some observation from his host, Monsignor Lelli stopped abruptly and addressed an entirely irrelevant remark to Giacinta. Silvio, who happened to be looking at him, saw his face change slightly as he looked beyond the professor towards the door leading from the restaurant on to the terrace. A small group of new arrivals was issuing from this door, and its members began to make their way to a vacant table a short distance from that occupied by the professor and his party.
Giacinta also had caught sight of the new-comers. "Look, Silvio!" she exclaimed, in a low tone; "look, father, there is Princess Montefiano's brother, Monsieur d'Antin, with those people!"
"Very well, Giacinta," returned the professor, vexed at the interruption; "he can go to the devil! Go on with what you were saying," he added to Don Agostino. "It was well put—very well put, indeed—but I think that I have an argument—"