Nina interrupted her reproachfully.  “Don’t you dare!  To hear you, one might suppose you were a hundred.  I don’t care a bit whether Don Giovanni is a Calaban or an Antinous—­All the same,” she laughed, “had I better tidy my hair—­or does it not matter?”

The tourists were all filing out of the castle now, and as the porter locked the doors, the princess shook hands with the little American.

“Thank you, Your Highness,” she said, “you have been real kind.  We—­I didn’t think, when I left home that I was going to be talking this way to princesses.  I never dreamed they were like you; and you talk beautiful English, too.”

With a warm impulse the princess laid her left hand over the cotton-gloved one in her right.

“Ah, but I was an American myself,” she said, “and it does me good to see a country-woman.”

They parted.  Again the guide made a deep reverence to “Her Excellency,” but to Nina the look in his eyes seemed both sly and suspicious.

In the meantime, the pony-cart carrying the prince and his brother was jogging slowly up the hills from the station.

Don Giovanni Sansevero—­by his own title the Marchese di Valdo—­was still on the hither side of thirty, but if a reputation for being “irresistible to women” goes for anything, he must by this time have had some experience in their ways.  At all events, his appearance so tallied with hearsay that, whether founded upon fact or not, the reputation remained.

He was supple and beautifully built, his bones were small and finely jointed, his features chiseled with classic regularity—­later on his lips might grow coarse, but as yet they were merely full.  The chief characteristic of his expression was its mobility, but it was the mobility of an actor who knows every emotion that the muscles of a face can command.  Sansevero’s face, also changeable as an April day, was the spontaneous expression of unconscious mood.  Giovanni was of a type to smile sweetly when most angry, or to assume an air of sulkiness when at heart he might be well content.  Just now, with an assumption of extreme indifference, he turned to his brother.

“What is she like, this heiress of yours whom you are so anxious to have me marry?” he asked.  “Plain, stupid, a nonentity?—­So much the better—­those make the easy wives to manage.  Give me a woman with little real success—­I mean, one who has seen only the imitation fire that is lighted when man pursues with reason and not with feeling.  The American men make it easy for the rest of us—­they are what you call curtain raisers in the play of love.  They keep the gallery busy until the entrance of the hero.  I hope she is not a beauty.”

“Per Bacco, how you do talk!” interrupted the prince.  “I have no chance to answer.  Miss Randolph is not a beauty; but she is simpatica; she has an air, a chic.”