“No.  Signorino.”  And then she generalised, with untranslatable magniloquence:  “Un amplissimo porporato non va mai solo.”

Peter ought to have hugged her for that amplissimo porporato.  But he was selfishly engrossed in his emotions.

“Who was with him?” He tried to throw the question out with a casual effect, an effect of unconcern.

“The Signorina Emelia Manfredi was with him,” answered Marietta, little recking how mere words can stab.

“Oh,” said Peter.

“The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was very sorry not to see the Signorino,” continued Marietta.

“Poor man—­was he?  Let us trust that time will console him,” said Peter, callously.

But, “I wonder,” he asked himself, “I wonder whether perhaps I was the least bit hasty yesterday?  If I had stopped, I should have saved the Cardinal a journey here to-day—­I might have known that he would come, these Italians are so punctilious —­and then, if I had stopped—­if I had stopped—­possibly —­possibly—­”

Possibly what?  Oh, nothing.  And yet, if he had stopped . . . well, at any rate, he would have gained time.  The Duchessa had already begun to thaw.  If he had stopped . . .  He could formulate no precise conclusion to that if; but he felt dimly remorseful that he had not stopped, he felt that he had indeed been the least bit hasty.  And his remorse was somehow medicine to his reviving hope.

“After all, I scarcely gave things a fair trial yesterday,” he said.

And the corollary of that, of course, was that he might give things a further and fairer trial some other day.

But his hope was still hard hurt; he was still in a profound dejection.

“The Signorino is not eating his dinner,” cried Marietta, fixing him with suspicious, upbraiding eyes.

“I never said I was,” he retorted.

“The Signorino is not well?” she questioned, anxious.

“Oh, yes—­cosi, cosi; the Signorino is well enough,” he answered.

“The dinner”—­you could perceive that she brought herself with difficulty to frame the dread hypothesis—­“the dinner is not good?” Her voice sank.  She waited, tense, for his reply.

“The dinner,” said he, “if one may criticise without eating it, the dinner is excellent.  I will have no aspersions cast upon my cook.”

“Ah-h-h!” breathed Marietta, a tremulous sigh of relief.

“It is not the Signorino, it is not the dinner, it is the world that is awry,” Peter went on, in reflective melancholy. “’T is the times that are out of joint.  ’T is the sex, the Sex, that is not well, that is not good, that needs a thorough overhauling and reforming.”

“Which sex?” asked Marietta.