when he frowned his long oval face looked
cold and proud, the face of an aristocrat who believed that the world
was made for him and his kind. "Tell the man that we cannot allow him to
take photographs here," he said.

The butler hesitated. "Highness, it is necessary that this man vivre. I
think he has not too much oof. _C'est dure, la publicite!_"

"I can't help that, Americo," Angelo persisted. "You can offer him food
if you think he is poor, but we do not want him to take photographs."

Vanno saw that Marie was looking at her husband intently, with a
peculiar, almost frightened expression, as if she were studying him
wistfully, and finding out something new which she had not wholly
understood.

"Angelo," she ventured, in a small, beguiling voice, "perhaps this poor
man has his pride of an artist. You see, I have a fellow feeling!" She
smiled pleadingly, yet mischievously, and turned an explanatory glance
on the cure. "I was an artist, and I should so love to know what is a
Stereo-Mondaine."

Vanno had never before liked her so much.

Angelo's face changed and softened. "If you want him, it is different!"
he returned. "But you've seemed always to have a horror of
snapshotters."

"He might take the garden," she suggested.

"Bring the fellow, Americo," said Prince Della Robbia.

The butler flushed furiously with joy. "Rightho, my good Highnesses," he
exclaimed; and the three who understood why he was funny stifled
laughter till he was out of earshot. "His English is a constant delight
to us," said Marie, instantly picking up again her sleigh-bell gayety of
manner, like a dropped, forgotten garment. "It's as wonderful as my
English maid's French, which she's earnestly studying, though she finds
that a language where meat is feminine and milk masculine simply doesn't
appeal to her reason. She's learned to call Wednesday 'Mur_cree_dy' and
Saturday 'Samdy.' When she goes to Mentone to buy me something at Aux
Dames de France, she says she's bought it at the 'Ox Daimes.' But she
reached her grandest height this morning. I walked into my room, to hear
her groaning at a window that looks toward Monte Carlo. 'Oh, those poor,
poor men committing suicide! I can't get them out of my head,' she
moaned when I asked if she were ill. 'That day when I went over there
sightseeing. It was too awful, walking on the terrace, to hear those
poor creatures blowing out their brains every two minutes down under the
Casino. I couldn't