And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared,
climbing the terrace steps.
"Bother!" exclaimed the Duchessa, under her breath. Then, to
Peter, "It will have to be for another time--unless I die of
the suspense."
After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly
priest joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man,
mentioned, when Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor
Langshawe. "This really is her chaplain," Peter concluded.
Then a servant brought tea.
"Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might
have wrought," he admonished himself, as he walked home through
the level sunshine. "In another instant, if we'd not been
interrupted, you would have let the cat out of the bag. The
premature escape of the cat from the bag would spoil
everything."
And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm
of retroactive terror. At the same time he was filled with a
kind of exultancy. All that he had hoped had come to pass, and
more, vastly more. Not only had he been received as a friend
at Ventirose, but he had been encouraged to tell her a part at
least of the story by which her life and his were so curiously
connected; and he had been snatched from the peril of telling
her too much. The day was not yet when he could safely say,
"Mutato nomine. . . . ." Would the day ever be? But,
meanwhile, just to have told her the first ten lines of that
story, he could not help feeling, somehow advanced matters
tremendously, somehow put a new face on matters.
"The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as
you think," he said to Marietta. "The curtain has risen upon
Act Three. I fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the
beginning of the end."