The Cardinal's Snuff Box

"I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes

packed."

But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.

"Hope," observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in

the preceding chapter, "hope dies hard."

Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that

afternoon. Already, that evening, it began to revive a little.

It was very much enfeebled; it was very indefinite and

diffident; but it was not dead. It amounted, perhaps, to

nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that he would not, on

the whole, make his departure for England quite so precipitate

as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his

despair, he had intended. Piano, piano! He would move slowly,

he would do nothing rash.

But he was not happy, he was very far from happy. He spent a

wretched night, a wretched, restless morrow. He walked about a

great deal--about his garden, and afterwards, when the damnable

iteration of his garden had become unbearable, he walked to the

village, and took the riverside path, under the poplars, along

the racing Aco, and followed it, as the waters paled. and

broadened, for I forget how many joyless, unremunerative miles.

When he came home, fagged out and dusty, at dinner time,

Marietta presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest

salver. She presented it with a flourish that was almost a

swagger.

Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it

was roughly thus: IL CARDLE UDESCHINI

Sacr: Congr: Archiv: et Inscript: Praef: Palazzo Udeschini.

And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small old-fashioned

hand, wonderfully neat and pretty:-"To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my

snuff-box."

"The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here," said Marietta.

There was a swagger in her accent. There was also something in

her accent that seemed to rebuke Peter for his absence.

"I had inferred as much from this," said he, tapping the card.

"We English, you know, are great at putting two and two

together."

"He came in a carriage," said Marietta.

"Not really?" said her master.

"Ang--veramente," she affirmed.

"Was--was he alone?" Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of

hope stirring in his heart.

"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.