"Rosa!" she said, "Rosa! what is it? Tell me, little thing. What is it? Who has made you cry?"
But Rosa only went on sobbing, and murmuring between her sobs: "Oh, gracious lady! gracious lady! What a calamity! What a dreadful calamity!"
After a few seconds of this Rosemary began to lose patience. She was English and practical, Rosa's continued sobbing and incoherent mutterings got on her nerves. She gave the girl a good-humoured shake.
"What calamity, Rosa?" she queried. "Bless the girl! I'll smack you, Rosa, if you don't speak."
Now this was a language that Rosa understood far better than a string of kindly inquiries. She had been smacked by her mother, almost as soon as she was born, she had been smacked by her elder sister, by her grandmother, by her aunt and by her father while she grew up, and when she started service in the château and was silly or tiresome she had been smacked by the gracious Countess. Being smacked did not hurt, but it acted as a tonic, and braced up Rosa's slackened nerves. The threat of it by the gracious English lady at once dried the well of her tears, she wiped her nose and eyes with her apron and murmured:
"The gracious Count Philip—they have taken him away."
At first Rosemary did not take it in. She did not trust her ears, or her knowledge of Hungarian. She must, she thought, have misunderstood Rosa, or else Rosa was talking like a fool. But Rosemary's grasp tightened on the girl's arm, her fingers buried themselves in the young, firm flesh.
"What do you mean, Rosa?" she queried. "What do you mean about the gracious Count? Who has taken him away?"
"The soldiers, gracious lady," Rosa murmured.
"What soldiers?" which was a foolish question on Rosemary's part—and she knew it. There were no soldiers now in Transylvania except the Roumanian soldiers. But somehow the thing would not penetrate into her brain—she felt that, too, and wanted to give it time to sink in slowly, slowly.