Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/420

 "And plenty of money."

"Money enough apparently."

"And she 's enormously admired."

"Oh, enormously."

"And she 's to marry a grandee."

"So they say."

Mary rose and turned to rejoin her companions, commenting these admissions with a pregnant silence. "Poor Miss Light!" she at last simply said. But it went, as for her ironic purpose, very far.

Late the next evening his servant brought him the card of a visitor. He was surprised at so nocturnal a call, but it may be said that when he read the inscription—Cavaliere Giuseppe Giacosa—he recognised the working of events. He had had an unnamed prevision of some sequel to the apparition at Madame Grandoni's—which the Cavaliere would have come to usher in.

He had come evidently on a portentous errand. He was as pale as some livid old marble mask into which he might have suggested that a pair of polished agate eyes had been for an occasion inserted. Prodigiously grave, he might have been the bearer of a cartel, had not his deep deference to his host and to the latter's general situation been clearly again his first need.

"You 've more than once done me the honour to invite me to call upon you, and I 'm ashamed of my long delay. But my time for many months has been particularly little my own." Rowland assented, ungrudgingly, fumbled for some Italian correlative of "Better late than never," begged him to be seated and offered him a cigar. The Cavaliere sniffed 386