“Oh, the title can’t be cut off as the entail has been. That descends to the next heir, whoever he may be, and nothing can deprive him of it. But where would be the good of the title, I should like to know, without the means to keep it up? It would be a white elephant—worse than useless. Everything depends on Luigi.” “He seems to me a rather clever young man.” “Oh yes, he’s clever enough in his way,” said the Captain with a short laugh. “The question is whether he’s not a little bit too clever. There lies our danger.” This was rather beyond Giovanna; but, as their fly drew up next minute at the station, nothing more was said; and as there were several other passengers in the compartment by which they travelled up to town, all further private conversation was deferred till they reached Giovanna’s rooms, where they found Luigi impatiently awaiting their arrival. The young Italian was a rank coward both morally and physically, and when told that he would have to face Sir Gilbert Clare on the morrow in his assumed _rôle_ of grandson to the baronet, his cheeks blanched and a nervous trembling took possession of him, which was not allayed till the Captain had administered to him a tolerably stiff dose of brandy. As already stated, Luigi was a fairly good-looking young man. He was tall and slender, with a pale olive complexion and clear cut features of an almost purely Greek type. His eyes were large, black and expressive, and the knowledge of how to make the most of them had come to him by intuition, as it does to the majority of his race. Jet black, soft and silky were his hair and moustache. He was very proud of his long tapering hands, and his carefully trimmed nails. Some of his friends said they were the hands of an artist, others, less complimentary, averred that he had the digits of a pickpocket. Both statements went beyond the mark, as the generality of extreme statements do, for although Luigi Rispani was a fairly clever drawing-master, he was entirely lacking in the creative faculty, and although he had no moral scruples whatever in lending himself to a scheme for defrauding Sir Gilbert Clare, nothing less than hard compulsion—a twinge of starvation, for instance—would have induced him to insert his hand into another man’s pocket and abstract therefrom a watch or purse. In the opinion of some people a transaction of the latter kind would have been much more venial than the one to which he had given his assent, but such was not Luigi Rispani’s way of thinking, and such is not the way of thinking of thousands of others.