Running up by different staircases, Beppo and Luigi came upon Aennchen nearly at the same time.  She turned a cold face on Beppo, and requested Luigi to follow her.  Astonished to see him in such favour, Beppo was ready to provoke the quarrel before the kiss when she returned; but she said that she had obeyed her mistress’s orders, and was obeying the duchess in refusing to speak of them, or of anything relating to them.  She had promised him an interview in that little room leading into the duchess’s boudoir.  He pressed her to conduct him.  “Ah; then it’s not for me you come,” she said.  Beppo had calculated that the kiss would open his way to the room, and the quarrel disembarrass him of his pretty companion when there.  “You have come to listen to conversation again,” said Aennchen.  “Ach! the fool a woman is to think that you Italians have any idea except self-interest when you, when you . . . talk nonsense to us.  Go away, if you please.  Good-evening.”  She dropped a curtsey with a surly coquetry, charming of its kind.  Beppo protested that the room was dear to him because there first he had known for one blissful half-second the sweetness of her mouth.

“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.