"'I have an extremely important letter to send off.'"
Here is a long balcony, shaded by pillared arches, the windows hung with loose blinds of reeds in gray and scarlet. If you adventure out into the hot sunlight, you may look away down the steep and rugged hill, where there are groups of flat-roofed, white houses dotted here and there among the dark palms and olives and arbored vines; and then your eyes naturally turn to the vast extent of shimmering blue sea, with the faint outline of the Italian coast and the peaked Vesuvius beyond. But inside, in the spacious, rather bare rooms, it is cooler; and in one of these, at the farther end, stands a young man in front of a piano, striking a chord from time to time, and exercising a voice that does not seem to have lost much of its
timbre; while there is an exceedingly pretty, gentle-eyed, rather foreign-looking young lady engaged in putting flowers on the central table, which is neatly and primly laid out for four.
"Come, Leo," she says, "is it not enough? You are in too great a hurry, I believe. Are you jealous of Mr. Doyle? Do you wish to go back at once? No, no; we must get Mr. Mangan and his bride to make a long stay, before we go over with them to the big towns on the mainland. Will you go out and see if the Risposta is visible yet."
"What splendid weather for Maurice and Francie, isn't it, Ntoniella?" said he (for there are other pet names besides the familiar Nina for any one called Antonia). "I wish we could have had our wedding-day along with theirs. Well, at least we will have our honeymoon trip along with them; and we shall have to be their guides, you know, in Venice and Rome and Florence, for neither of them knows much Italian."
"Yes, but, Leo," said Nina, who was still busy with her flowers, "when we go back with them to Naples, you really must speak properly. It is too bad—the dialect—it is not necessary; you can speak well if you wish. It was only to make fun of Sabetta that you began, now it is always."
He only laughed at her grave remonstrance.
"Oh, don't you preach at me, Ntoniella!" he said, in the very language she was deprecating. "There are lots of things I can say to you that sound nicer that way."
He turned from the piano at last and took up an English newspaper that he had previously opened.