it in.

He had come, evidently, on a portentous errand. He was as pale as ashes
and prodigiously serious; his little cold black eye had grown ardent,
and he had left his caressing smile at home. He saluted Rowland,
however, with his usual obsequious bow.

"You have more than once done me the honor to invite me to call upon
you," he said. "I am ashamed of my long delay, and I can only say to
you, frankly, that my time this winter has not been my own." Rowland
assented, ungrudgingly fumbled for the Italian correlative of the adage
"Better late than never," begged him to be seated, and offered him a
cigar. The Cavaliere sniffed imperceptibly the fragrant weed, and then
declared that, if his kind host would allow him, he would reserve it for
consumption at another time. He apparently desired to intimate that
the solemnity of his errand left him no breath for idle smoke-puffings.
Rowland stayed himself, just in time, from an enthusiastic offer of a
dozen more cigars, and, as he watched the Cavaliere stow his treasure
tenderly away in his pocket-book, reflected that only an Italian could
go through such a performance with uncompromised dignity. "I must
confess," the little old man resumed, "that even now I come on business
not of my own--or my own, at least, only in a secondary sense. I have
been dispatched as an ambassador, an envoy extraordinary, I may say, by
my dear friend Mrs. Light."

"If I can in any way be of service to Mrs. Light, I shall be happy,"
Rowland said.

"Well then, dear sir, Casa Light is in commotion. The signora is in
trouble--in terrible trouble." For a moment Rowland expected to hear
that the signora's trouble was of a nature that a loan of five thousand
francs would assuage. But the Cavaliere continued: "Miss Light has
committed a great crime; she has plunged a dagger into the heart of her
mother."

"A dagger!" cried Rowland.

The Cavaliere patted the air an instant with his finger-tips. "I speak
figuratively. She has broken off her marriage."

"Broken it off?"

"Short! She has turned the prince from the door." And the Cavaliere,
when he had made this announcement, folded his arms and bent upon
Rowland his intense, inscrutable gaze. It seemed to Rowland that he
detected in the polished depths of it a sort of fantastic gleam of
irony or of triumph; but superficially, at least, Giacosa did nothing
to discredit his character as a presumably sympathetic representative of
Mrs. Light's afflictio