“Give me another cigar,” answered Julião, putting on his hat; “or stay—give me two, rather.”
“Take the box; when I travel alone, I smoke a pipe. Take it.”
He wrapped the box in a “Diario de Noticias,” and gave it to Julião, who put it under his arm.
“Take care not to catch the fever, and be sure you discover a gold mine before you come back,” he said in a low voice as he went downstairs. “Good-night!”
Jorge and Sebastião re-entered the parlor together. Ernesto was leaning against the piano, twisting the ends of his mustache, and Luiza was playing the prelude to a waltz of Strauss,—“The Blue Danube.”
“Do you want to waltz, Donna Felicidade?” said Jorge to that lady, laughing, as he approached her with extended arms.
She smilingly shook her head. Yet why should she not waltz? She was not an old woman, and she had the reputation of having been a good dancer. She still remembered the waltz she had danced with the king, Dom Fernando, in the time of the Regency, in the palace of the Necessidades; it was a lovely waltz of that epoch called the “Pearl of Ophir.” Seated on the sofa, the counsellor at her side, she was conversing with him in a voice low and full of emotion on a subject that apparently interested her deeply.
“Yes, believe me,” she said, “I think you are looking very well indeed.”
“My health is always better in summer,” responded the counsellor, who was slowly folding and unfolding his handkerchief of India silk. “And you, Donna Felicidade, how are you?”
“Ah, I too am very much better, Counsellor. My digestion is excellent; no more flatulency. I am a different person.”