“A propos of Miss Light,” she asked, “do you know her well?”

“I can hardly say that.  But I have seen her repeatedly.”

“Do you like her?”

“Yes and no.  I think I am sorry for her.”

Mary had spoken with her eyes on the pavement.  At this she looked up.  “Sorry for her?  Why?”

“Well—­she is unhappy.”

“What are her misfortunes?”

“Well—­she has a horrible mother, and she has had a most injurious education.”

For a moment Miss Garland was silent.  Then, “Is n’t she very beautiful?” she asked.

“Don’t you think so?”

“That ’s measured by what men think!  She is extremely clever, too.”

“Oh, incontestably.”

“She has beautiful dresses.”

“Yes, any number of them.”

“And beautiful manners.”

“Yes—­sometimes.”

“And plenty of money.”

“Money enough, apparently.”

“And she receives great admiration.”

“Very true.”

“And she is to marry a prince.”

“So they say.”

Miss Garland rose and turned to rejoin her companions, commenting these admissions with a pregnant silence.  “Poor Miss Light!” she said at last, simply.  And in this it seemed to Rowland there was a touch of bitterness.

Very late on the following evening his servant brought him the card of a visitor.  He was surprised at a visit at such an hour, but it may be said that when he read the inscription—­Cavaliere Giuseppe Giacosa—­his surprise declined.  He had had an unformulated conviction that there was to be a sequel to the apparition at Madame Grandoni’s; the Cavaliere had come to usher it in.

He had come, evidently, on a portentous errand.  He was as pale as ashes and prodigiously serious; his little cold black eye had grown ardent, and he had left his caressing smile at home.  He saluted Rowland, however, with his usual obsequious bow.

“You have more than once done me the honor to invite me to call upon you,” he said.  “I am ashamed of my long delay, and I can only say to you, frankly, that my time this winter has not been my own.”  Rowland assented, ungrudgingly fumbled for the Italian correlative of the adage “Better late than never,” begged him to be seated, and offered him a cigar.  The Cavaliere sniffed imperceptibly the fragrant weed, and then declared that, if his kind host would allow him, he would reserve it for consumption at another time.  He apparently desired to intimate that the solemnity of his errand left him no breath for idle smoke-puffings.  Rowland stayed himself, just in time, from an enthusiastic offer of a dozen more cigars, and, as he watched the Cavaliere stow his treasure tenderly away in his pocket-book, reflected that only an Italian could go through such a performance with uncompromised dignity.  “I must confess,” the little old man resumed, “that even now I come on business not of my own—­or my own, at least, only in a secondary sense.  I have been dispatched as an ambassador, an envoy extraordinary, I may say, by my dear friend Mrs. Light.”