“Who told you that persons who don’t like your mistress are going to talk in there?” said Aennchen.

“You,” said Beppo.

Aennchen drew up in triumph:  “And now will you pretend that you didn’t come up here to go in there to listen to what they say?”

Beppo clapped hands at her cleverness in trapping him.  “Hush,” said all her limbs and features, belying the previous formal “good-evening.”  He refused to be silent, thinking it a way of getting to the little antechamber.  “Then, I tell you, downstairs you go,” said Aennchen stiffly.

“Is it decided?” Beppo asked.  “Then, good-evening.  You detestable German girls can’t love.  One step—­a smile:  another step—­a kiss.  You tit-for-tat minx!  Have you no notion of the sacredness of the sentiments which inspires me to petition that the place for our interview should be there where I tasted ecstatic joy for the space of a flash of lightning?  I will go; but it is there that I will go, and I will await you there, signorina Aennchen.  Yes, laugh at me! laugh at me!”

“No; really, I don’t laugh at you, signor Beppo,” said Aennchen, protesting in denial of what she was doing.  “This way.”

“No, it’s that way,” said Beppo.

“It’s through here.”  She opened a door.  “The duchess has a reception to-night, and you can’t go round.  Ach! you would not betray me?”

“Not if it were the duchess herself,” said Beppo; “he would refuse to satisfy man’s natural vanity, in such a case.”

Eager to advance to the little antechamber, he allowed Aennchen to wait behind him.  He heard the door shut and a lock turn, and he was in the dark, and alone, left to take counsel of his fingers’ ends.

“She was born to it,” Beppo remarked, to extenuate his outwitted cunning, when he found each door of the room fast against him.

On the following night Vittoria was to sing at a concert in the Duchess of Graatli’s great saloon, and the duchess had humoured Pericles by consenting to his preposterous request that his spy should have an opportunity of hearing Countess d’Isorella and Irma di Karski in private conversation together, to discover whether there was any plot of any sort to vex the evening’s entertainment; as the jealous spite of those two women, Pericles said, was equal to any devilry on earth.  It happened that Countess d’Isorella did not come.  Luigi, in despair,—­was the hearer of a quick question and answer dialogue, in the obscure German tongue, between Anna von Lenkenstein and Irma di Karski; but a happy peep between the hanging curtains gave him sight of a letter passing from Anna’s hands to Irma’s.  Anna quitted her.  Irma, was looking at the superscription of the letter, an the act of passing in her steps, when Luigi tore the curtains apart, and sprang on her arm like a cat.  Before her shrieks could bring succour, Luigi was bounding across the court with the letter in his possession.