“I suppose I cannot hope that you will tell me more,” he said.

“I do not see why I should,” answered Spicca, drinking again.  “I asked you an indiscreet question and I have given you an explanation which you are kind enough to accept.  Let us say no more about it.  It is better to avoid unpleasant subjects.”

“I should not call Madame d’Aranjuez an unpleasant subject,” observed Orsino.

“Then why did you suddenly cease to visit her?” asked Spicca.

“For the best of all reasons.  Because she repeatedly refused to receive me.”  He was less inclined to take offence now than five minutes earlier.  “I see that your information was not complete.”

“No.  I was not aware of that.  She must have had a good reason for not seeing you.”

“Possibly.”

“But you cannot guess what the reason was?”

“Yes—­and no.  It depends upon her character, which I do not pretend to understand.”

“I understand it well enough.  I can guess at the fact.  You made love to her, and one fine day, when she saw that you were losing your head, she quietly told her servant to say that she was not at home when you called.  Is that it?”

“Possibly.  You say you know her well—­then you know whether she would act in that way or not.”

“I ought to know.  I think she would.  She is not like other women—­she has not the same blood.”

“Who is she?” asked Orsino, with a sudden hope that he might learn the truth.

“A woman—­rather better than the rest—­a widow, too, the widow of a man who never was her husband—­thank God!”

Spicca slowly refilled and emptied his goblet for the tenth time.

“The rest is a secret,” he added, when he had finished drinking.

The dark, sunken eyes gazed into Orsino’s with an expression so strange and full of a sort of inexplicable horror, as to make the young man think that the deep potations were beginning to produce an effect upon the strong old head.  Spicca sat quite still for several minutes after he had spoken, and then leaned back in his cane chair with a deep sigh.  Orsino sighed too, in a sort of unconscious sympathy, for even allowing for Spicca’s natural melancholy the secret was evidently an unpleasant one.  Orsino tried to turn the conversation, not, however, without a hope of bringing it back unawares to the question which interested him.

“And so you really mean to stay here all summer,” he remarked, lighting a cigarette and looking at the people seated at a table behind Spicca.

Spicca did not answer at first, and when he did his reply had nothing to do with Orsino’s interrogatory observation.

“We never get rid of the things we have done in our lives,” he said, dreamily.  “When a man sows seed in a ploughed field some of the grains are picked out by birds, and some never sprout.  We are much more perfectly organised than the earth.  The actions we sow in our souls all take root, inevitably and fatally—­and they all grow to maturity sooner or later.”