“I really believe,” the Englishman remarked, in conclusion,—“I really believe that haughty old dago can help us if anybody can. And when your engaging young protégée has completed her conquest,—to-morrow, it may be, or the day 53 after, for she’s making quick work of it,—we’ll see what can be done with him.”
And, after all, what could have been more natural than the attraction which, from that time forth, manifested itself between the Count and his small countrywoman? If the little girl, in making her very marked advances, had been governed by the unwavering instinct which always guided her choice of companions, the old man, for his part, could not but find refreshment, after his long, solitary voyage, in the pretty Tuscan prattle of the child. Most Italians love children, and the Count Giovanni Battista Allamiraviglia appeared to be no exception to his race.
The two would sit together by the hour, absorbed, neither in the lovely sights of this wonderful Mediterranean voyage, nor in the movements of those about them, but simply and solely in one another.
“She’s telling her own story better than we could do,” Mr. Grey used to say.
It was now no unusual thing to see the child established on the old gentleman’s knee, and once Blythe found her fast 54 asleep in his arms. But it was not until the very last day of the voyage that the most wonderful thing of all occurred.
The sea was smooth as a lake, and all day they had been sailing the length of the Riviera. All day people had been giving names to the gleaming white points on the distant, dreamy shore,—Nice, Mentone, San Remo,—names fragrant with association even to the mind of the young traveller, who knew them only from books and letters.
Blythe and the little girl were sitting, somewhat apart from the others, on the long bench by the hatchway where Cecilia had first laid siege to the Count’s affections, and Blythe was allowing the child to look through the large end of her field-glass,—a source of endless entertainment to them both. Suddenly Cecilia gave a little shriek of delight at the way her good friend, Mr. Grey, dwindled into a pigmy; upon which the Count, attracted apparently by her voice, left his chair and came and sat down beside them.
As he lifted his hat, with a polite 55 “Permetta, Signorina,” Blythe noticed, for the first time on the whole voyage, that he was without his gloves. Perhaps the general humanising of his attitude, through intercourse with the child, had caused him to relax this little point of punctilio.
Cecilia, meanwhile, had promptly climbed upon his knee, and now, laying hold of one of the ungloved hands, she began twisting a large seal ring which presented itself to her mind as a pleasing novelty. Presently her attention seemed arrested by the device of the seal, and she murmured softly, “Fideliter.”
Blythe might not have distinguished the word as being Latin rather than Italian, had she not been struck by the change of countenance in the wearer of the ring. He turned to her abruptly, and asked, in French: