At noon next day Gemma called at the Embassy, and was shown into the waiting-room. She had not remained there five minutes when suddenly the Ambassador’s daughter burst into the room with a loud cry of welcome, and kissed her visitor enthusiastically on both cheeks in Italian fashion. Slight, and strange rather than pretty, she had a delicate face, dark eyes, a small quivering nose, a rather large, ever-ruddy mouth, and curling, straggling black locks, which ever waved as in a perpetual breeze.
“I’m so glad, so very glad you’ve called, dear,” Carmenilla said enthusiastically. “Father mentioned the other day that you were in England, and I’ve wondered so often why you’ve never been to see us.”
“I’ve been staying with friends in the country,” Gemma explained. “I suppose you speak English quite well now.”
“A little. But oh! it is so difficult,” she laughed. “And it is so different here to Firenze or Rome. The people are so strange.”
“Yes,” Gemma sighed. “I have also found it so.”
In their girlhood days they had been close friends through five years at the grey old convent of San Paolo della Croce in the Via della Chiesa at Firenze, and afterwards at Rome, where Carmenilla had lived with a rather eccentric old aunt, the Marchesa Tassino, while her father had been absent fulfilling the post of Ambassador at Vienna.
“I’m so very glad you’ve called,” Castellani’s daughter repeated. “Come to my room; take off your things and stay to luncheon. Father is out, and I’m quite alone.”
“The Count is out,” repeated her visitor in a feigned tone of regret. Truth to tell, however, it was intelligence most welcome to her. “I’m sorry he’s not at home. We haven’t met for so long.”
“Oh, he’s dreadfully worried just now!” his daughter answered. “The work at this Embassy is terrible. He seems writing and interviewing people from morning until night. He works much harder now than any of the staff; while at Brussels it was all so different. He had absolutely nothing to do.”
“But this England is such a great and wonderful country, while Belgium is such a tiny one,” Gemma observed. “The whole diplomatic world revolves around London.”