But while Nina slept with a happy little smile still lying in the corners of her mouth, the princess in her own room was having an animated conversation with her husband.

“Leonora, my treasure!” he exclaimed joyously, “things go well for Giovanni with la bella Nina? Hein? With her fortune!  And to have such an air and grace, too—­it is really Giovanni that is a lucky one!” Before his wife could interrupt he went on, “Five hundred thousand dollars income—­that is to be her dot, isn’t it?  Why, we can have all the rooms at Torre Sansevero opened, and you, my beautiful one, shall have again the comfort that your wretch of a husband has deprived you of!”

His excited appropriation of Nina’s fortune for the general family coffers jarred; and the princess at once checked his rapidly soaring imaginings.

“Not so fast!  Not so fast!  Remember the American girl is used to arranging her own marriage, and besides . . . for nothing in the world would I try to influence her.  Should it turn out unhappily I could never forgive myself . . . never!”

Sansevero looked at his wife in open-eyed amazement.  “What has come over you, my dear!  I am not proposing to sell your Miss Millions to a rag gatherer.  She has no amount of beauty—­yes (as he followed Eleanor’s expression), she has a charming countenance—­molto simpatica—­also a distinction that is really rarer in your country of beautiful women.  Giovanni, on his side, certainly has all that one could ask in the way of good looks and intelligence.  He is young, and he is the sole heir to my titles and estates—­She would be getting a very good exchange for her dollars, I am thinking.  There is no use to make a face like that; I am not trying to sell her to an ogre.  Why, he does not even gamble——­”

“No—­but do you think Giovanni can be true to a woman?”

Sansevero laughed.  “What would you have?  Are you becoming a Puritan miss, Leonora mia?” He shrugged his shoulders.  “He is young and he has heart!  Would you have for a nephew-in-law a St. Anthony?”

As the princess still looked worried, he seemed afraid that he had hurt his project.  “Giovanni is of a type that women like,” he said reassuringly, “and probably he has had his successes—­that is all I meant.  Don’t be so suspicious!  I want merely to further the interests of two young people who are in every way suited to each other.  Giovanni may be an anchorite, for all I know.”

Eleanor stood turning her wedding ring round and round on her finger.  Then she looked anxiously into her husband’s face.  He was puffing at a cigarette that he had lighted, and his eyes looked back into hers with the perfectly innocent expression of a child’s.

CHAPTER IX

A DOOR IS OPENED THAT GIOVANNI PREFERS TO KEEP CLOSED

The eyes of La Favorita boded good to no one!  As a hostess her deportment left much to be desired, but since her visitors were limited to her very intimate friends it mattered, perhaps, little.  At all events, as guest after guest arrived in her over-decorated salon, she looked up expectantly, and then resumed her expression of ugly indifference.