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 talk about. I mean you look as if you were engaged in a great Cause, or something. Are you?"

"Am I?" He smiled, and then replied with a gallantry in which there was obviously enough genuineness to excuse it: "I am engage' in sitting on a bench with Miss Claire Ambler. With that privilege, how could I be engage' in anything else?"

"There you go!" she protested. "Whenever I try to find out what your mystery is, you say something like that. You always do it, too, when I mention Baron Bastoni or his brother; but maybe that's only because you feel a social difference between you and them."

"Social?" The young man's shoulders, rising slightly, disclaimed the imputation. "There is an English word, 'snob.' Modern Italy believes it is bourgeois to be a snob. We will be brother to any man who is brother to us in what he thinks. I do not care anything social, one way or the other, about the Bastoni. I am not a snob."

"Mr. Rennie told me the other day what you do care about," she said. "You care about Fascismo."

"Yes," he said gravely. "Well?"

"Is that why you hate the Bastoni? Because they