"By virtue of being—the good friend of the Baron Bonelli!"
"Meaning by that?"
"Nothing—and everything!" said the Princess with another trill of laughter.
"In Rome, dear friend," said Don Camillo, "a woman can do anything she likes as long as she can keep people from talking about her."
"Oh, you never do that apparently," said the Englishman. "But why doesn't the Baron make her a Baroness and have done with the danger?"
"Because the Baron has a Baroness already."
"A wife living?"
"Living and yet dead—an imbecile, a maniac, twenty years a prisoner in his castle in the Alban hills."
IV
The curtain parted over the inner doorway, and three gentlemen came out. The first was a tall, spare man, about fifty years of age, with an intellectual head, features cut clear and hard like granite, glittering eyes under overhanging brows, black moustaches turned up at the ends, and iron-grey hair cropped very short over a high forehead. It was the Baron Bonelli.