Suddenly and without warning old Saracinesca returned from his wanderings.  He had taken the trouble to keep the family informed of his movements by his secretary during two or three months and had then temporarily allowed them to lose sight of him, thereby causing them considerable anxiety, though an occasional paragraph in a newspaper reassured them from time to time.  Then, on a certain afternoon in November, he appeared, alone and in a cab, as though he had been out for a stroll.

“Well, my boy, are you ruined yet?” he inquired, entering Orsino’s room without ceremony.

The young man started from his seat and took the old gentleman’s rough hand, with an exclamation of surprise.

“Yes—­you may well look at me,” laughed the Prince.  “I have grown ten years younger.  And you?” He pushed his grandson into the light and scrutinised his face fiercely.  “And you are ten years older,” he concluded, in a discontented tone.

“I did not know it,” answered Orsino with an attempt at a laugh.

“You have been at some mischief.  I know it.  I can see it.”

He dropped the young fellow’s arm, shook his head and began to move about the room.  Then he came back all at once and looked up into Orsino’s face from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

“Out with it, I mean to know!” he said, roughly but not unkindly.  “Have you lost money?  Are you ill?  Are you in love?”

Orsino would certainly have resented the first and the last questions, if not all three, had they been put to him by his father.  There was something in the old Prince’s nature, something warmer and more human, which appealed to his own.  Sant’ Ilario was, and always had been, outwardly cold, somewhat measured in his speech, undemonstrative, a man not easily moved to much expression or to real sympathy except by love, but capable, under that influence, of going to great lengths.  And Orsino, though in some respects resembling his mother rather than his father, was not unlike the latter, with a larger measure of ambition and less real pride.  It was probably the latter characteristic which made him feel the need of sympathy in a way his father had never felt it and could never understand it, and he was thereby drawn more closely to his mother and to his grandfather than to Sant’ Ilario.

Old Saracinesca evidently meant to be answered, as he stood there gazing into Orsino’s eyes.

“A great deal has happened since you went away,” said Orsino, half wishing that he could tell everything.  “In the first place, business is in a very bad state, and I am anxious.”

“Dirty work, business,” grumbled Saracinesca.  “I always told you so.  Then you have lost money, you young idiot!  I thought so.  Did you think you were any better than Montevarchi?  I hope you have kept your name out of the market, at all events.  What in the name of heaven made you put your hand to such filth!  Come—­how much do you want?  We will whitewash you and you shall start to-morrow and go round the world.”