“Does it not seem to you,” he asked, “that if you receive him at all, you might at least conceal something of your hatred for him?”

“Why should I?  Have you forgotten what I told you yesterday?”

“It would be hard to forget that, though you told me no details.  But it is not easy to imagine how you can see him at all if he killed your husband deliberately in a duel.”

“It is impossible to put the case more plainly!” exclaimed Maria Consuelo.

“Do I offend you?”

“No.  Not exactly.”

“Forgive me, if I do.  If Spicca, as I suppose, was the unwilling cause of your great loss, he is much to be pitied.  I am not sure that he does not deserve almost as much pity as you do.”

“How can you say that—­even if the rest were true?”

“Think of what he must suffer.  He is devotedly attached to you.”

“I know he is.  You have told me that before, and I have given you the same answer.  I want neither his attachment nor his devotion.”

“Then refuse to see him.”

“I cannot.”

“We come back to the same point again,” said Orsino.

“We always shall, if you talk about this.  There is no other issue.  Things are what they are and I cannot change them.”

“Do you know,” said Orsino, “that all this mystery is a very serious hindrance to friendship?”

Maria Consuelo was silent for a moment.

“Is it?” she asked presently.  “Have you always thought so?”

The question was a hard one to answer.

“You have always seemed mysterious to me,” answered Orsino.  “Perhaps that is a great attraction.  But instead of learning the truth about you, I am finding out that there are more and more secrets in your life which I must not know.”

“Why should you know them?”

“Because—­” Orsino checked himself, almost with a start.

He was annoyed at the words which had been so near his lips, for he had been on the point of saying “because I love you”—­and he was intimately convinced that he did not love her.  He could not in the least understand why the phrase was so ready to be spoken.  Could it be, he asked himself, that Maria Consuelo was trying to make him say the words, and that her will, with her question, acted directly on his mind?  He scouted the thought as soon as it presented itself, not only for its absurdity, but because it shocked some inner sensibility.

“What were you going to say?” asked Madame d’Aranjuez almost carelessly.

“Something that is best not said,” he answered.

“Then I am glad you did not say it.”

She spoke quietly and unaffectedly.  It needed little divination on her part to guess what the words might have been.  Even if she wished them spoken, she would not have them spoken too lightly, for she had heard his love speeches before, when they had meant very little.

Orsino suddenly turned the subject, as though he felt unsure of himself.  He asked her about the result of her search, in the morning.  She answered that she had determined to take the apartment in the Palazzo Barberini.