feelings.  Perhaps it was delicacy on the duchess’s part—­not policy.  He was on the point of saying something himself, to make the chance which he had determined to give her still better, when the servant announced another visitor.  The duchess, on hearing the name—­it was that of an Italian prince—­gave a little imperceptible pout, and said to Newman, rapidly:  “I beg you to remain; I desire this visit to be short.”  Newman said to himself, at this, that Madame d’Outreville intended, after all, that they should discuss the Bellegardes together.

The prince was a short, stout man, with a head disproportionately large.  He had a dusky complexion and a bushy eyebrow, beneath which his eye wore a fixed and somewhat defiant expression; he seemed to be challenging you to insinuate that he was top-heavy.  The duchess, judging from her charge to Newman, regarded him as a bore; but this was not apparent from the unchecked flow of her conversation.  She made a fresh series of mots, characterized with great felicity the Italian intellect and the taste of the figs at Sorrento, predicted the ultimate future of the Italian kingdom (disgust with the brutal Sardinian rule and complete reversion, throughout the peninsula, to the sacred sway of the Holy Father), and, finally, gave a history of the love affairs of the Princess X——.  This narrative provoked some rectifications on the part of the prince, who, as he said, pretended to know something about that matter; and having satisfied himself that Newman was in no laughing mood, either with regard to the size of his head or anything else, he entered into the controversy with an animation for which the duchess, when she set him down as a bore, could not have been prepared.  The sentimental vicissitudes of the Princess X——­led to a discussion of the heart history of Florentine nobility in general; the duchess had spent five weeks in Florence and had gathered much information on the subject.  This was merged, in turn, in an examination of the Italian heart per se.  The duchess took a brilliantly heterodox view—­thought it the least susceptible organ of its kind that she had ever encountered, related examples of its want of susceptibility, and at last declared that for her the Italians were a people of ice.  The prince became flame to refute her, and his visit really proved charming.  Newman was naturally out of the conversation; he sat with his head a little on one side, watching the interlocutors.  The duchess, as she talked, frequently looked at him with a smile, as if to intimate, in the charming manner of her nation, that it lay only with him to say something very much to the point.  But he said nothing at all, and at last his thoughts began to wander.  A singular feeling came over him—­a sudden sense of the folly of his errand.  What under the sun had he to say to the duchess, after all?  Wherein would it profit him to tell her that the Bellegardes were traitors and that the old lady, into the bargain was a murderess?