CHAPTER XLIII
The dream-like Arabian Night unexpectedness which had descended on Neale the evening before, on the roof, continued shimmeringly to wrap everything in improbability. Instead of receiving his unfamiliar name with the vague, conventional smile of a new acquaintance, the girl raised her eyebrows high in a long, delicate arch and cried out, "You are! Really! The one who has inherited Crittenden's?" Seeing Neale's look of almost appalled amazement, she broke into a sudden laugh. Neale had never heard any one laugh like that, almost like some one singing, so clear and purely produced was its little trill. And yet it had been as sudden and spontaneous as a gush of water from a spring.
"I don't wonder you look astonished," she told him. "But you see when I was a little girl I used often to play in and out of old Mr. Crittenden's house and mill. I've never seen anything since in all my life that seemed as wonderful and mighty to me as the way the saw used to gnash its teeth at the great logs and slowly, shriekingly tear them apart into boards. Didn't you use to love the moss on the old water-wheel, too?"
"I never saw the mill or the house," he told her. "I never saw my great-uncle but once or twice in my life." He was too amazed to do anything but answer her literally and baldly.
"Why, how in the world...?" she began to ask, and then as a bell from one of the innumerable church belfries outside began clangorously to strike the hour, she glanced at her wrist-watch, and shook her head. "It's breakfast-time," she said. She nodded, smiled and turned away, stepping down the corridor with a light, supple gait. Neale had never seen any one walk like that, as though every step were in time to music.
He went back to his room to wash his hands and brush his clothes, which showed signs of contact with dusty Roman walls and roofs. When, ten minutes later, he went into the dining-room, five or six people were already at table, Livingstone among them. Miss Oldham, the head of the pension, introduced the newcomer to the others, mentioning names on both sides. To Neale's surprise, Miss Allen did not explain (as he had opened his mouth to do) that she had already seen and talked to Mr. Crittenden that morning. Instead, she now gave him the conventional smile he had expected ten minutes before, accepted the introduction as though she had never seen his face and went on drinking her café-au-lait.
More Arabian Nights. What did this mean? Neale swallowed the reference he had begun to their earlier meeting. Miss Oldham said to him with the wearily playful accent of the conscientious pension-keeper, fostering cheerful talk around her table, "I understand, Mr. Crittenden, that you and Miss Allen are in a way related, as I might say."
Livingstone joined in with his usual sprightliness: "Yes, Crittenden, why didn't you tell me you had a fellow-townswoman in Rome? Last evening when I went back into the salon and told the assembled company about you and your inheritance there was Mademoiselle Allaine, who had often, in her remote childhood, climbed on the respected knees of Monsieur your Great-uncle."
Miss Allen smiled quietly over her cup, remarked that it would have taken a bolder child than she had ever been to climb on the knees of old Mr. Crittenden, and, looking at her watch, rose to go. "Music, divine music?" inquired Livingstone.
"Yes, divine music," she answered lightly. "We are getting ready to play at a soirée at Donna Antonia Pierleoni's. I'm due there at half past nine to try out the piano in a new position in the room."