The elder man raised his brows and slowly inclined his head.
Romanelli sprang to his feet in genuine alarm. His face had grown pale in an instant.
“Good heavens!” he gasped in his own tongue. “Surely the game has not been given away?”
The Doctor extended his palms and raised his shoulders to his ears. When he spoke Italian, he relapsed into all his native gesticulations, but in speaking English he had no accent, and few foreign mannerisms.
The two maid-servants regarded the sudden alarm of their master’s guest from London with no little astonishment; but the Doctor, quick-eyed, noticed it, and, turning to them, exclaimed in his perfect English—
“You may both leave. I’ll ring, if I require anything more.”
As soon as the door had closed, Arnoldo, leaning on the back of his chair, demanded further details from his host. He had only arrived from London an hour before, and, half famished, had at once sat down to dinner.
“Be patient,” his host said in a calm, strained tone quite unusual to him. “Sit down, and I’ll tell you.” Arnoldo obeyed, sinking again into his chair, his dark brows knit, his arms folded on the table, his eyes fixed upon those of the Doctor.
Outwardly there was nothing very striking about either, beyond the fact that they were foreigners of a well-to-do class. The English of the elder man was perfect, but that of Romanelli was very ungrammatical, and in both faces a keen observer might have noticed expressions of cunning and craftiness. Any Italian would have at once detected, from the manner Romanelli abbreviated his words when speaking Italian, that he came from the Romagna, that wild hot-bed of lawlessness and anarchy lying between Florence and Forli, while his host spoke pure Tuscan, the language of Italy. The words they exchanged were deep and earnest. Sometimes they spoke softly, when the Doctor would smile and stroke his smooth-shaven chin, at others they conversed with a volubility that sounded to English ears as though they were quarrelling.
The matter under discussion was certainly a strangely secret one.