Through all Franz said, however, there ran still, as of yore, one constant thread of undying hatred to the man who had outwitted him at Meran and St Valentin. “Then you haven’t forgiven him yet?” Will inquired at last, after one such spiteful allusion to Andreas’s meanness. The Robbler’s hand moved instinctively of itself to his left breast pocket. He had changed his coat, but not his customs. “I carry it here still,” he answered, with the same old defiant air, just defining with finger and thumb the vague outline of the knife that bulged between them through the glossy broadcloth. “It’s always ready for him. Ze day I meet him—” and he stopped short suddenly, with a face like a bulldog’s. “You Tyrolers have long memories,” Will answered, with a little shudder. “It’s very unfashionable you know, to stab a rival in London.” Franz showed his handsome teeth. “Unfashionable or not,” he replied, with a shrug, “it is so I was born; it is so I live ever. As we say in ze song, I am made zat way. I cannot help it. I never forget an injury. . . . Zough, mind you,” he continued, after a telling little pause, during which he drove many times an imaginary knife into an invisible enemy, “it isn’t so much now zat I grudge him Linnet. Let him keep his fine Frau. Zere are better girls in ze world, you and I have found out, zan Lina Telser—to-day Frau Hausberger. We were younger zen; we are men of ze world now; we know higher sings, I sink, zan a Zillerthal _sennerin_. What I feel wis him at present is not so much zat he took away ze girl, as zat he played me so mean a trick to take her.” Will smiled to himself in silence. How strangely human feelings and ideas differ! He himself had never forgotten the beautiful alp-girl with the divine voice; in the midst of London drawing-rooms he never ceased to miss her; while Franz Lindner thought he had left Linnet far, far behind, since he became acquainted with those higher and nobler types, the music-hall stars of the London Pavilion! “There’s no accounting for tastes,” people say; oh, most inept of proverbs! surely it’s easy for anyone to account for the reasons which made Linnet appear so different now in Franz Lindner’s eyes and in her English poet’s. But before Franz and Will parted at the Circus that afternoon, they had made mutual promises, for old acquaintance’s sake—Franz, that he would graciously accept a stall, on an off-night, at the Duke of Edinburgh’s, to see Will’s new piece, _The Duchess of Modena_; and Will, that he would betake himself to the London Pavilion one of these next few evenings, to hear Signor Francesco, alias the Frenchy, in his celebrated and universally encored impersonation of Mossoo Robert in Regent Street. CHAPTER XXVIII SIGNORA CASALMONTE