"Oh!" she exclaimed volatilely, "do you remember, Blue Eyes—I mean, my lord—when I sat on the table in the inn at Toulouse and drank wine out of your cup, surrounded by you and your huge troopers, and when I was supposed to be a wandering vagrant girl called Damaris?"
"You will always be Damaris to me. I shan't call you 'Princess' nor 'Highness,' and I wish you would not call me by that silly title of 'lord.' And I've only been one a month, and have not grown used to it."
"But what am I to call you? I mustn't call you Blue Eyes any more, because we are now grave and staid; and Adrian is too familiar. I should poniard you if you were to call me Ana."
"There was another name exchanged between us once," I said—"one alluded to in your letter received by me to-day."
"Ah!" she said, with a little shriek, "don't recall that. How dare you! I only wrote it to bring myself back to your memory."
"Oh!" I said, "did you? Well, now, what did your high—I mean you, Damaris—send for me for at all, if it was only to be so haughty and distant? There are no more burning houses to save you from; and as for—for—old Alberoni——"
"Monseigneur the Cardinal Alberoni, if you please."
"As for Monseigneur the Cardinal Alberoni—well! what has become of him? He has finished his sch—politics—I suppose?"
"He lives the life of a saint at Piacenza. But—but I did not send for you to talk about his Eminence."