“Very likely,” said Nino calmly.  “But meanwhile there are two of us, and perhaps I am the greater.  You will do what I ask, maestro; is it not true?  And it was not I who said it; it was the baroness.”

“The baroness—­yes—­and may the maledictions of the inferno overtake her,” said De Pretis, casting up his eyes and feeling in his coat-tail pockets for his snuff-box.  Once, when Nino was younger, he filled Ercole’s snuff-box with soot and pepper, so that the maestro had a black nose and sneezed all day.

What could Ercole do?  It was true that he had hitherto helped Nino.  Was he not bound to continue that assistance?  I suppose so; but if the whole affair had ended then, and this story with it, I would not have cared a button.  Do you suppose it amuses me to tell you this tale?  Or that if it were not for Nino’s good name I would ever have turned myself into a common storyteller?  Bah! you do not know me.  A page of quaternions gives me more pleasure than all this rubbish put together, though I am not averse to a little gossip now and then of an evening, if people will listen to my details and fancies.  But those are just the things people will not listen to.  Everybody wants sensation nowadays.  What is a sensation compared with a thought?  What is the convulsive gesticulation of a dead frog’s leg compared with the intellect of the man who invented the galvanic battery, and thus gave fictitious sensation to all the countless generations of dead frogs’ legs that have since been the objects of experiment?  Or if you come down to so poor a thing as mere feeling, what are your feelings in reading about Nino’s deeds compared with what he felt in doing them?  I am not taking all this trouble to please you, but only for Nino’s sake, who is my dear boy.  You are of no more interest or importance to me than if you were so many dead frogs; and if I galvanise your sensations, as you call them, into an activity sufficient to make you cry or laugh, that is my own affair.  You need not say “thank you” to me.  I do not want it.  Ercole will thank you, and perhaps Nino will thank me, but that is different.

I will not tell you about the interview that Ercole had with Hedwig, nor how skilfully he rolled up his eyes and looked pathetic when he spoke of Nino’s poverty and of the fine part he had played in the whole business.  Hedwig is a woman, and the principal satisfaction she gathered from Ercole’s explanation was the knowledge that her friend the baroness had lied to her in explaining those strange words she had overheard.  She knew it, of course, by instinct; but it was a great relief to be told the fact by someone else, as it always is, even when one is not a woman.

CHAPTER VIII