“By Jove, you little fire-eater!”

“Well, I had to show him that I was an American, anyhow.”

“I suppose he was annoyed.”

“He was very much annoyed.  Man, he’s challenged me to fight a duel.  Only think of it, a real duel!  He said I’d have to fight, or he’d thrash me for a coward.  I—­it’s a horrid scrape, but I don’t see how I’m going to get out of it with—­with honour.  Will you—­if I do have to—­but look here, I won’t have him running me through with a sword, or anything of that sort.  I’m afraid I couldn’t face that.  I wouldn’t mind a revolver quite as much.”

“The big bully!” I exclaimed.  “But of course it’s all rot.  There can be no question of your fighting him.”

“I don’t know.  I’d rather do that—­if we could have pistols—­than have him think an American—­could be a coward.  I’m not a coward, I hope, only—­only I never thought of anything like this.  He’s going to send a friend of his to call on you, as a friend of mine, he said.  I suppose that means a what-you-may-call-’em—­a ‘second,’ doesn’t it?  If I must fight with him, Man, you will be my second, won’t you, and—­and act for me, if that’s the right word?”

Gazing up earnestly, his eyes very big, his face pale, he looked no more than fourteen, and the idea of a duel to the death between this child and Gaeta’s whirlwind would have been comic in the extreme, had I not been enraged with the whirlwind.

“I’ll be your friend, and get you out of the scrape,” I said.  “But it will mean that you must give up the Contessa.”

“Give up the Contessa!” echoed the Boy.  “What do I want with the Contessa!  I’m sick of the sight of her.”

“Since when?”

“Since the first day we met.  I don’t think she’s even pretty.  What you can see in her, I don’t know—­the silly little giggling thing!  There, it’s out at last.”

“What I see in her?” I repeated.  “I like that.”

“I always supposed you did.  But I can’t stand her.”

“Well, of all the——­ Look here, why have you been hanging after her, if you—­”

“I didn’t.  I just wasn’t going to let you make a fool of yourself over her, and then regret it afterwards.  So I—­I did my best to take her attention away from you, and I succeeded fairly well.  It—­vexed me to see you falling in love with her.  She wasn’t worth it.”

“There was never the remotest chance of my doing so.”

“You said there was.”

“I was chaffing, just to hear myself talk.  I should have thought you would know that.”

“How could I know?  You were always saying how pretty and dainty she was, and quoting poetry about her, while all the time I could read her shallow little mind, and see how different she was from what you imagined.”

“I think I have a fairly clear idea of her limitations.”

“But you told me that you’d planned to go down to Monte Carlo expressly to see the Contessa; and you said that it would perhaps be a wise thing for you to try and fall in love with her.”