“Could we get Elver?” he asked anxiously, and Leon looked up with his boyish smile.
“Growing onions in Seville has softened you, Raymondo mio!” He never failed in moments of great strain to taunt the heavy man with his two years of agricultural experiment, and they knew that the gibes were deliberately designed to steady his mind. “Onions are sentimental things—they make you cry: a vegetable muchos simpatico! This woman is alive!”
Her eyelids had fluttered twice. Leon lifted the bare arm, inserted the needle of a tiny hypodermic and pressed home the plunger.
“To-morrow she will feel exactly as if she had been drunk,” he said calmly, “and in her mouth will be the taste of ten rank cigars. Oh, senorinetta, open thy beautiful eyes and look upon thy friends!”
The last sentence was in Spanish. She heard: the lids fluttered and rose.
“You’re a long way from Heavytree Farm, Miss Leicester.”
She looked up wonderingly into the kindly face of George Manfred.
“Where am I?” she asked faintly, and closed her eyes again with a grimace of pain.
“They always ask that—just as they do in books,” said Leon oracularly. “If they don’t say ‘Where am I?’ they ask for their mothers. She’s quite out of danger.”
One hand was on her wrist, another at the side of her neck.