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"What do you predict will Gheta take it, understand, or will she play the frozen princess?" "If I know Gheta, she'll take it," Lavinia promptly replied. Orsi presented Gheta Sanviano with the necklace at dinner. She took it slowly from its box and glanced at the diamond clasp. "Thank you, Cesare, immensely! What a shame that pink pearls so closely resemble coral! No one gives you credit for them."
The coffee was on when the elder sister said: "I had a card from the Grand Hotel a while ago; Abrego y Mochales is there." "And there," Orsi put in promptly, "I hope he'll stay, or sail for Spain. I don't want the clown about here." Gheta turned. "But you will regret that," she addressed Lavinia; "you always found him so fascinating."
Having told of the last days of the Commune as seen by Count Orsi and the Marquis de Compiègne, there remains one more narrative, the experiences of a man still more intimately connected with the events of that terrible period, though, like a soldier in battle, he seems to have been able to see only what was around him, and could take no general view of what went on in other parts of the field.
"Thank you, Signor Orsi," Lavinia responded with every indication of a modesty, which, in fact, was the indifference of a supreme contempt. "I have been blind," he asseverated, vivaciously gesticulating with his thick hands. Lavinia studied him with a remote young brutality, from his fluffy disarranged hair, adhering to his wet brow, to his extravagantly pointed shoes.
He agreed eagerly; and Lavinia wondered whether she had been clumsy. She simply couldn't imagine marrying Cesare Orsi, but she knew that such a match for Gheta was freely discussed, and she hoped that her sister would not make difficulties.
Mantegazza rose and bowed in mock serious formality, at which Lavinia shrugged an impatient shoulder and walked with Orsi across the room and out upon the terrace. Florence had sunk into a dark chasm of night, except for the curving double row of lights that marked the Lungarno and the indifferent illumination of a few principal squares. The stars seemed big and near in deep blue space.
Orsi looked on without any emotion visible on his heavy face. Anna Mantegazza leaned forward, tense with interest. "Bravo!" she called. Gheta Sanviano smiled. The bull did not see Mochales at first, then the man cried tauntingly. The bull turned and stood with a lowered slowly-moving head, an uneasy tail.
The truth, it may be suspected, was that Parquin was drunk, or that, having suspected the object of the expedition, he had some especial object in going ashore, which he would not reveal to his fellow-conspirators. "Persigny," continues Count Orsi, "consented to the idea, and Parquin and I got into the boat. The vessel was lying in the stream. Thélin was with us.
"Your sister is beautiful," he added abruptly. "Everybody thinks so," Lavinia replied in a voice she endeavored to make enthusiastic. "She has had tens of admirers here and at Rome and Lucca." There she knew she should stop; but she continued: "Cesare Orsi is very persistent and tremendously rich." Mochales made a short unintelligible remark in Spanish.
The subsequent history of the sepoy revolt is little more than a detail of the military operations of British troops for the dispersion of the rebels and restoration of order and law. BATTLES OF MAGENTA AND SOLFERINO, Pietro Orsi
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