Friends of the Boy's (nameless to me, like all links with his outside life) had stopped lately at the hotel where Molly, Jack, and I had stayed; he therefore proposed to go to the same house, and this jumped with my inclination: for the hotel had a cheerful and home-like individuality which I liked.
Pitying the Little Pal's distress, though I chaffed him for it, I undertook the business of getting out the handbills I had suggested, and arranging for an advertisement in a paper with a local circulation. I had to visit the post-office, engaging in a long discussion with the officials who controlled the diligence, and the business occupied more than an hour. In mercy to Boy, I had not delayed for any selfish attention to personal comfort, and tramping back through an inch of white dust to the hotel, I was still as travel-worn as on our arrival in the town, nearly two hours ago. I had forbidden the tired child to accompany me, and by this time he would no doubt be refreshed with a bath and a change of clothing, as, fortunately, not all his personal belongings had been contained in the ill-fated bag. He would be impatiently waiting for me at the hotel door, perhaps; and I quickened my steps, in haste to give him details of my doings.
Entering the garden, I had to bound onto the grass, to escape being run over by a pair of horses prancing round the curve, at my back. I turned with a basilisk glare intended for the coachman, but instead met the astonished gaze of the very last eyes I could possibly have expected. My glare melted into a smile, but not one of my best, though the eyes which called it forth were alluringly beautiful.
"Contessa!" I exclaimed. "Is this you, or your astral body?"
"Lord Lane!" the lovely lady-of-the-eyes responded. "But no, it is not possible!"
Just as I was about to protest that it was not only possible, but certain, I caught sight of the Boy, in the doorway. As, at the Contessa's word, the carriage came to a sudden halt, she reaching out to me two little grey suede hands, the slim figure at the door drew back a step, as if involuntarily; but there was no getting round it, my Italian beauty had made Boy a present of my name, whether he wanted it or not.
Enter the Contessa
"She was the smallest lady alive,
Made in a piece of nature's madness,
Too small, almost, for the life and gladness
That over-filled her."
—Robert Browning.