“I knew very little of the young lady,” I hastened to explain; “the Professor is my friend. He has, on several occasions, told me what a great help she was to him in his experiments.”
“She is his right hand,” declared the young man. “Her knowledge of certain branches of chemistry is, perhaps, unequalled in a woman.”
“And yet she is delightful and charming, and nothing of a blue-stocking, I understand,” I remarked.
He smiled, for was he not the happy lover! Ah! what an awakening must be his ere long!
But we gossiped on. His face, however, betrayed a great anxiety, and time after time he expressed wonder why Ethelwynn had not remained at home to keep the appointment, or left him some message.
Indeed, we searched both her boudoir and her bedroom to find his telegram, but all in vain. Then again we returned to the dining-room.
“I suppose you’ve known the Professor for some years,” I remarked, hoping that he would tell me the story of their acquaintance.
“Oh, yes,” answered the young man, twisting a fresh cigarette between his fingers. “I first met him and Ethelwynn at the Gandolfi Palace, in Rome, four years ago. I was staying with my aunt, the Marchesa Gandolfi, and they were at the Grand Hotel. I saw quite a lot of them all through the Roman season. The Professor gave some lectures before one of the Italian learned societies, and I had frequent opportunities to take Ethelwynn out to see the sights of the Eternal City. I happen to know Rome very well, for I spent all my youth there with my aunt, an Englishwoman, who married into the Roman nobility, and who, like every other Englishwoman who takes such a step, repented it afterwards.”
“You mean she was not very happy with her husband?” I said. “I’ve heard before that mixed marriages in Italy are never very successful.”
“No,” he sighed; “my poor aunt, though she became a Marchesa and possessed a dozen different titles and probably the finest palazzo in Rome, was very soon disillusioned. The Marchese was an over-dressed elegant, who lived mostly at his club, ogled women each afternoon in the Corso, or played baccarat till dawn. And Roman society was not at all kind to her because she was just a plain Englishwoman of a county family. Gandolfi was thrown from his horse while riding over one of his estates down in Calabria two years ago.”