"Certainly, Monsieur le Baron, certainly," he replied. "It is, indeed, a duty to assist the princess in this—this exceedingly painful affair."
He paused, and looked at Monsieur d'Antin inquiringly, as though to intimate that he was only waiting to hear how the latter proposed to act.
Monsieur d'Antin proceeded with some deliberation to light another cigarette.
"I felt convinced that you would agree with me," he said, at length. "I am quite aware—my sister has often told me, indeed—what confidence she has in your judgment. I regard it as very fortunate that she has so reliable a counsellor. A woman left in her position needs some man at her side who will give her disinterested advice; and you, of course, Monsieur l'Abbé, enjoy two great advantages. In the first place, you have the influence of your sacred calling, which, as we both know, my sister regards with extreme reverence; and, in the next place, though a foreigner by birth, you are as much at home in Italy and with Italians as though you were one of themselves."
The Abbé Roux bowed. "Madame la Princesse has, indeed, chosen to honor me by asking my advice occasionally on matters quite apart from my profession," he replied.
Monsieur d'Antin blew a cloud of smoke into the air. There was, perhaps, the faintest suspicion of impatience in the action.
"Precisely," he returned. "Knowing this, I feel that we can discuss the peculiar situation in which Donna Bianca has placed herself—or, I should rather say, in which an unscrupulous young man has placed her—as two men of the world. Is it not so? My sister," he continued, without giving the priest time to reply, "would naturally merely look at the affair from the moral point of view. She would be deeply scandalized by it, and shocked at what she would regard almost as depravity in one whom she has hitherto considered to be still a child. All that is very well—but we men, my dear abbé, know that there are other things to be thought of in these cases of indiscretion on the part of young girls."
"The deception," said the Abbé Roux, shaking his head; "the princess will feel the deception practised by her step-daughter very acutely."
Monsieur d'Antin tapped a neatly shod foot on the floor.
"Dear Monsieur l'Abbé," he observed, gently, "let us ignore the deception as being one of those moral points of the case which, I think, we have agreed to leave out of our discussion. The question is, does my sister wish Donna Bianca to marry, or does she not?"