Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/140

 watch, at the door, for a moment that I can snatch? He was not the same as the other.'

'As the other?'

'Doubtless there are fifty! I mean the little one whom I met in the other house, that Sunday afternoon.'

'I sit in my room almost always now,' said the old woman. 'I only come down to eat.'

'Dear lady, it would be better if you would sit here,' the Prince remarked.

'Better for whom?'

'I mean that if you did not withdraw yourself you could at least answer my questions.'

'Ah, but I have not the slightest desire to answer them,' Madame Grandoni replied. 'You must remember that I am not here as your spy.'

'No,' said the Prince, in a tone of extreme and simple melancholy. 'If you had given me more information I should not have been obliged to come here myself. I arrived in London only this morning, and this evening I spent two hours walking up and down opposite the house, like a groom waiting for his master to come back from a ride. I wanted a personal impression. It was so that I saw him come in. He is not a gentleman—not even like some of the strange ones here.'

'I think he is Scotch,' remarked Madame Grandoni.

'Ah, then, you have seen him?'

'No, but I have heard him. He speaks very loud—the floors of this house are not built as we build in Italy—and his voice is the same that I have heard in the people of that country. Besides, she has told me—some things. He is a chemist's assistant.'