My True Friend

"Good morning, Prospero," said Annunziata.

"Good morning, Wide-awake," responded John.

He was in the octagonal room on the piano nobile of the castle, where his lost ladies of old years smiled on him from their frames. He had heard an approaching patter of feet on the pavement of the room beyond; and then Annunziata's little grey figure, white face, and big grave eyes, had appeared, one picture the more, in the vast carved and gilded doorway.

"I have been looking everywhere for you," she said, plaintive.

"Poor sweetheart," he commiserated her. "And can't you find me?"

"I couldn't," said Annunziata, bearing on the tense. "But I have found you now."

"Oh? Have you? Where?" asked he.

"Where?" cried she, with a disdainful movement. "But here, of course."

"I wouldn't be too cocksure of that," he cautioned her. "Here is a mighty evasive bird. For, suppose we were elsewhere, then there would be here, and here would be somewhere else."

"No," said Annunziata, with resolution. "Where a person is, that is always here."

"You speak as if a person carried his here with him, like his hat," said John.

"Yes, that is how it is," said Annunziata, nodding.

"You have a remarkably solid little head,-for all its curls, there's no confusing it," said he. "Well, have you your report, drawn up, signed, sealed, sworn to before a Commissioner for Oaths, and ready to be delivered?"

"My report-?" questioned Annunziata, with a glance.

"About the Form," said John. "I caught you yesterday red-handed in the fact of pumping it."

"Yes," said Annunziata. "Her name is Maria Dolores."

"A most becoming name," said he.

"She is very nice," said Annunziata.

"She looks very nice," said he.

"She is twenty-two years and ten months old," continued his informant.

"Fancy. As middle-aged as that," commented he.

"Yes. She is an Austrian."

"Ah."

"And as I told you, she is visiting the Signora Brandi. Only, she calls her Frao Branta."

"Frao Branta?" John turned the name on his tongue. "Branta? Branta?" What familiar German name, at the back of his memory, did it half evoke? Suddenly he had a flash. "Can you possibly mean Frau Brandt?"

Annunziata gave a gesture of affirmation.

"Yes, that is it," she said. "You sound it just as she did!"

"I see," said John. "And Brandt, if there are degrees of unbirth, is even more furiously unborn than Brandi."

"Unborn-?" said Annunziata, frowning.

"Not noble-not of the aristocracy," John explained.

"Very few people are noble," said Annunziata.

"All the more reason, then, why you and I should be thankful that we are," said he.

"You and I?" she expostulated, with a shrug of her little grey shoulders. "Machè! We are not noble."

"Aren't we? How do you know?" asked John. "Anyhow," he impressively moralized, "we can try to be."

"No," said she, with conclusiveness, with fatalism. "It is no good trying. Either you are noble or simple,-God makes you so,-you cannot help it. If I were noble, I should be a contessina. If you were noble, you would be a gransignore.

"And my unassuming appearance assures you that I'm not?" said he, smiling.

"If you were a gransignore," she instructed him, "you would never be such friends with me-you would be too proud."

John laughed.

"You judge people by the company they keep. Well, I will apply the same principle of judgment to your gossip, Maria Dolores. By-the-by," he broke off to inquire, "what is her Pagan name?"

"Her Pagan name? What is that?" asked Annunziata.

"Maria Dolores, I take it, is her Christian name, come by in Holy Baptism," said John. "But I suppose she will have a Pagan name, come by in the way of the flesh, to round it off with,-just as, for instance, a certain flame of mine, whose image, when I die, they'll find engraved upon my heart, has the Pagan name of Casalone."

Annunziata looked up, surprised. "Casalone? That is my name," she said.

"Yes," said John. "Yours will be the image."

Annunziata gave her head a toss. "Maria Dolores did not tell me her Pagan name," she said.

"At any rate," said he, "to judge by the company she keeps, we may safely classify her as unborn. She is probably the daughter of a miller,-of a miller (to judge also a little by the frocks she wears) in rather a large way of business, who (to judge finally by her cultivated voice, her knowledge of languages, and her generally distinguished air) has spared no expense in the matter of her education. I shouldn't wonder a bit if she could even play the piano."

"No," agreed Annunziata, "that is very likely. But why"-she tilted upwards her inquisitive little profile-"why should you think she is the daughter of a miller?"

"Miller," said John, "I use as a generic term. Her father may be a lexicographer or a dry-salter, a designer of dirigible balloons or a manufacturer of air-pumps; he may even be a person of independent means, who lives in a big, new, stuccoed villa in the suburbs of Vienna, and devotes his leisure to the propagation of orchids: yet all the while a miller. By miller I mean a member of the Bourgeoisie: a man who, though he be well to do, well educated, well bred, does not bear coat-armour, and is therefore to be regarded by those who do with their noses in the air,-especially in Austria. Among Austrians, unless you bear coat-armour, you're impossible, you're nowhere. We mustn't let you become enamoured of her if she doesn't bear coat-armour."

Annunziata's eyes, during this divagation, had wandered to the window, the tall window with its view of the terraced garden, where the mimosa bloomed and the blackcaps carolled. Now she turned them slowly upon John, and he saw from their expression that at last she was coming to what for her (as he had known all along) was the real preoccupation of the moment. They were immensely serious, intensely concerned, and at the same time, in their farther recesses, you felt a kind of fluttering shyness, as if I dare not were hanging upon I would.

"Tell me," she began, on a deep note, a deep coaxing note.... Then I dare not got the better, and she held back.... Then I would took his courage in both hands, and she plunged. "What have you brought for me from Roccadoro?" And after one glance of half-bashful, all-impassioned supplication, she let her eyes drop, and stood before him suspensive, as one awaiting the word of destiny.