'What are you going to do this evening?' Barbarisi asked Andrea.
'I really don't know.'
'Well, then, come with us--dinner at eight, at Doney's, to inaugurate
his new restaurant at the Teatro Nazionale.'
'Yes, come with us, do come with us!' entreated Giulio Musellaro.
'Besides the three of us,' continued the duke, 'there will be Giulia
Arici, Bebe Silva and Maria Fortuna--That reminds me--capital idea!--you
bring Clara Green.'
'A capital idea!' echoed Ludovico Barbarisi.
'And where shall I find Clara Green?'
'At the Hotel de l'Europe, close by, in the Piazza di Spagna. A note
from you would put her in the seventh heaven. She is certain to give up
any other engagement she may have.'
Andrea was quite agreeable to the plan.
'But it would be better if I called on her,' he said. 'She is pretty
sure to be in now. Don't you think so, Ruggiero?'
'Well, dress quick and come out with us now.'
Clara Green had just come in. She received Andrea with childish delight.
No doubt she would have preferred to dine alone with him, but she
accepted the invitation without hesitating, wrote a note to excuse
herself from a previous engagement, and sent the key of her box at the
theatre to a lady friend. She seemed overjoyed. She told him a string of
sentimental stories and vowed that she had never been able to forget
him; holding Andrea's hands in hers while she talked.
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