Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/188

 "Yes? What was the whispering?"

"It could not be true, I am sure; but there was some foolish whispering that Don Arturo had talked a little recklessly of some gentlemen; but I heard nothing that would permit me to guess who the gentlemen are."

"What had he said of them?"

"Nobody knows."

"To whom did he talk?"

Onorati rubbed his right cheek and then his left cheek. "Ah, yes! I remember hearing that it might have been to some foreign ladies at the convent."

By the "convent" he meant the hotel that had been a monastery, and Eugene Rennie, on his way there, stopped halfway down a flight of stone steps, and made a sound as of a dolorous kind of laughter. Then he questioned himself upon this very sound. "Why the devil will a man do that?" he asked himself. "How is it that one is able to see something grotesquely humorous even in a tragedy? In this one, probably because the character of the heroine makes it a tragi-comedy—with the emphasis on the first half of the word, I'm afraid. Avanti, then, for my own miserable part in it!"

The concierge informed him that Miss Ambler was