“That is my brother Paolo,” replied the Baron, unbending slightly.

“He will join us later,” added the Baronessa, with a quick look at the pretty and rich little widow which betrayed to me a secret.  She then turned a dark, disapproving gaze upon me which told another, and I could have laughed aloud.  “They want to nobble my poor little Contessa for brother-aeronaut, and they don’t countenance chance meetings with strange young men,” I said to myself, greatly amused.  “If they can see through the dust, and suspect in me a possible rival for the absent, they have sharp eyes, or keen imaginations, and I may be in for a little fun.”

We were at the hotel door, and I was allowed to help the Contessa out, though the elder lady preferred the aid of the concierge.  For the moment Gaeta had forgotten the claims of her companions, and remembered only mine.  It is a butterfly way of hers to forget easily, and flutter with delight in a new corner of the garden, just because it is new.

“You are staying here?  How nice!” she exclaimed, without giving me time to answer.  “We should have arrived last night, but we had an accident to our carriage—­a broken wheel.  It was coming down from the Hospice of St. Bernard, which we had been to visit—­oh, not to please me, do not think it.  It was the Baron, here.  In dim ages his people and the saint were cousins, though the idea of a saint having cousins seems actually sacrilegious, doesn’t it?  I do not love monks, I only respect them, which is so disagreeable.  But the Baron took us. Dio mio! I have no warm blood left.  It was frozen up there.  And then, that our carriage should have broken down at a little place—­the wrong end of nowhere—­Bourg St. Something!  We had to stop all night.  Fancy me without my maid, who was to meet me here.  I do not know if my dress is not on wrong side before.  Later, we all have to go on to Chamounix and then to Aix-les-Bains.  I’ve taken a villa there for a month.  You must come and see me.”

Thus she chattered on as we entered the hotel, and then, suddenly, her bright eyes fell upon the Boy, who had retired near the stairway.  There he stood, with a book in his hand, and an unwonted colour in his brown cheeks, glowing red under the strange blue jewels of his eyes.

“What a divine boy!” the Countess half whispered to me, not taking her gaze from him.  “He is exactly like a wonderful painting by some old Master of my own dear country.  What eyes!  They are better and bigger sapphires than any I own, though I’ve some famous ones.  And how strange they are—­looking out of his brown face, from under such black lashes, too.  Oh, a picture, certainly.  He is not like a modern, every-day boy, at all.  He can’t be English, of that I’m sure, and yet——­”

“He is American,” I said, when she paused thoughtfully, the Boy at his distance reading or pretending to read, as he stood.  “But you are right.  He is very far from being an every-day boy.”