Aside from her appearance, the story that Giovanni had related of the contessa’s marriage was in itself enough to arouse the interest of any girl alive to romance.  According to him, she was the daughter of a Russian nobleman of great family and wealth.  The Count Olisco (a mild-eyed Italian boy, he looked) had been attached to the legation at St. Petersburg.  Zoya was only sixteen years old when she announced her intention of marrying him.  Her father, furious that the Italian had dared approach his daughter, demanded his recall, whereupon she told him the astonishing news that Olisco had never, to her knowledge, even seen her.  But she declared that if her father did not marry her to him, she would kill herself.

She did take poison but, being saved by the doctors, who discovered it through her maid, she sent the same maid to tell the Count Olisco the whole story.  The romance of her act, coupled with her beauty and her birth, naturally so flattered the young Italian that he offered himself as a suitor, and, her father relenting, they were married.

Nina was left for some time to her own thoughts, as her Italian (not particularly fluent at best) was altogether lacking in idiom, and she missed the point of most that was said.  In the first lull, the Count Olisco asked her the usual question put to every stranger, “How do you like Rome?”

The Countess Olisco, like an echo, caught and repeated her husband’s inquiry, “Ah, and do you like Rome?”

And then Carpazzi hoped she liked Rome—­and this very harmless subject was tossed gently back and forth, until Prince Minotti gave it an unexpectedly violent fling by remarking, “I suppose Signorina, that you have been impressed”—­he held the pause with evident satisfaction—­“with the great history of the Carpazzi, without which there would be no Rome!”

All at once the young man in the threadbare coat became like a live wire!  His hair, which already was en brosse, seemed to rise still higher on his head, his thin lips quivered, and his hands worked in a complete language of their own.  He put up an immediate barrier with his palms held rigidly outward.  All the table stopped to look, and to listen.

“Does a Principe Minotti”—­he pronounced the word “Principe” with a sneering curl of the lips—­“dare to criticize a Carpazzi?” He threw back his head with a jerk.

“What is he?” whispered Nina to Tornik, who was sitting next her.  “Is he a duke?”

“A Don, that is all, I believe.”

Softly as the question was put and answered, Carpazzi heard.  Showing none of the fury of a moment before he spoke suavely, though still with arrogance.

“Signorina is a stranger in Rome; the Count Tornik also is a foreigner, which excuses an ignorance that would be unpardonable in an Italian.”

Tornik at that moment pulled his mustache, looking at it down the length of his nose.  It was impossible to tell whether the movement hid annoyance or amusement.  Nina was keen with curiosity.