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Rh her maid to find out. if the Duca della Rocca were in Floralia.

At his palace they said that he was.

"Dear me, perhaps he'll go after her," thought Madame Mila. "But I don't know why she's so secret about it, and takes such precautions. Nobody'd cut her for anything she might do so long as she's all that money; and so long as she don't marry she can't lose it."

Madame Mila did not understand it at all. Her experience in the world assured her that her cousin might have Della Rocca, or anybody else, constantly beside her whenever she liked, and nobody would say anything—so long as she had all that money.

She felt that she was badly treated, that there was something not confided to her, and also she certainly ought to have been asked to go to Rome at her cousin's expense. She was sulky and irritated.

"Hilda is so queer and so selfish," she said to herself, and began a letter to the Iles Britanniques; with many tender endearments and much pathos, and the most gracefully worded appeal