Rocca was not placed within her sight; and after the dinner the young English Prince would talk to no one but herself, delightedly recalling to her how often she had bowled his wickets down when they had been young children playing on the lawns at Osborne. She felt disloyally thankless for his preference. He monopolised her. And as the rooms filled with the crowd of the reception she merely saw the delicate dark head of Della Rocca afar off, bent down in eager and possibly tender conversation with his beautiful country-woman, the Duchess Medici-Malatesta. She felt angered and impatient.
If she had sat alone and neglected, as less lovely women often do, instead of being monopolised by a prince, with twenty other men sighing to take his place when etiquette should permit them, she could scarcely have been more ill-content.
Never in all her life had it befallen her to think angrily of another woman's beauty; and now she caught herself irritatedly conning, across the width of the room, the classic profile and the immense
