“And for you also, Marc’antonio.”

He was silent.

“And for you also, Marc’antonio?” I repeated it as a question.

“Your escape would have been put down to me, Englishman.  I had provided for that,” he answered simply.

“Forgive me,” I muttered, thrown back upon sudden contrition.  “I was thinking only that you must feel it a punishment to be left alone with me.  I had forgot—­”

“It is hard,” he interrupted, “to bear everything in mind when one is young.”  His tone was quiet, decisive, as of one stating a fact of common knowledge; but the reproof cut me like a knife.

“The Princess has gone too?” I asked.

“She has gone.  They are all gone.  That is why it would have been better for her too that you had escaped.”

I pondered this for a minute.  “You mean,” said I, “that—­always supposing the Prince had not killed you in his rage—­you would now be at her side?”

He nodded.  “Still, she has Stephanu.  Stephanu will do his best,” I suggested.

“Against what, eh?” He put his poser to me, turning with angry eyes, but ended on a short laugh of contempt.  “Do not try make-believe with me, O Englishman.”

“There is one thing I know,” said I, doggedly, “that the Princess is in trouble or danger.  And a second thing I know, that you and Stephanu are her champions.  But a third thing, which I do not know, is why you and Stephanu hate one another.”

“And yet that should have been the easiest guess of the three,” said he, rising abruptly and taking first a dozen paces toward the hut, then a dozen back to the shadow of the chestnut tree against the bole of which my head rested as he had laid me, having borne me thither from the sty.

“Campioni? That is a good word, and I thank you for it, Englishman.  Yet you wonder why I hate Stephanu?  Listen.  Were you ever in Florence, in the Boboli gardens?”

“Never.  But why?”

“Mbe!  I have travelled, for my part.”  Marc’antonio now and always mentioned his travels with an innocent boastfulness.  “Well, in the gardens there you will find a fountain, and on either side of it a statue—­the statues of two old kings.  They sit there, those two, carved in stone, face to face across the fountain; and with faces so full of hate that I declare it gives you a shiver down the spine—­all the worse, if you will understand, because their eyes have no sight in them.  Now the story goes that these two kings in life were friends of a princess of Tuscany far younger than themselves, and championed her, and established her house while she was weak and her enemies were strong; and that afterwards in gratitude she caused these statues to be set up beside the fountain.  Another story (to me it sounds like a child’s tale) says that at first there was no fountain, and that the princess knew nothing of the hatred between these old men; but the sculptor knew.  Having