“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. “Mache! 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.”