"It is our first balance sheet at the mines. These are the tons of ore taken out," he answered, pointing to various totals, "this is the present market price paid for the first shipment, and this is the amount we are turning out now per day. At the same rate, the year's payment, at a conservative estimate, will be that amount. At all events I shall send you a check the first of August for fifty thousand lire."
"Fifty thousand lire! Oh, Sandro!" The instinct of the woman showed, in that her husband was her first thought; and her voice vibrated joyously. "Fifty thousand lire!" they both repeated as though unable to comprehend—and then, the full meaning of it dawning upon him, the prince threw his arms about her in wild exuberance.
"Oh, my dear one!"—he punctuated each phrase with kisses—"now you shall have everything . . . everything . . . your heart can wish! Stoves you shall have . . . servants and dresses. . . . Yes, and your emeralds! And your pearls! You shall have . . . emeralds set in a footstool! Every soldo is for you, carissima, it is all yours, yours!"
Gently she stopped him. "Sandro," she smiled, "Sandro mio, not the mines of the Indies could supply your plans for spending!" Then her voice broke, but she laughed through her tears and buried her face against his throat.
After a moment the princess recovered herself. She looked up, blushing like a girl—a little self-conscious that any one should have witnessed the scene between herself and her husband. "We are very foolish," she laughed. "But it is good to feel so joyous as that!" She got up and, as she passed Nina, she put her hand caressingly under the girl's chin. "It has not been a bad day, after all, has it?" she said. "And when fortune begins to come, it always comes in waves—the difficulty is to make it begin." Then she looked back at her husband, "Sandro, come with me, will you? These children will not mind, I am sure, if we leave them for a little while, and I want very much to talk to you." She smiled her apology to Nina and Derby, who both stood up. Then she and the prince went out of the door together, his arm about her waist.
When they had gone, Nina said softly: "They are dears, aren't they! Oh, Jack, aren't you proud to think you are the cause of every bit of the gladness they are feeling to-day?" She glanced up at him, her eyes alight with a brilliant softness and tenderness. But he did not look at her, and so answered merely her words: "I guess it would have worked out all right, anyway." And then he seemed to study the pattern of the carpet, and there was silence.
Nina stood leaning against a heavy table, and Derby stood near her with his hands in his pockets and his attention engrossed on the floor. Both seemed incapable of speaking or moving, as though a hypnotic spell had fallen upon them. Twice, while her aunt and uncle were in the room, Derby had looked at her with an expression that set Nina's heart beating, but now they were alone it had entirely vanished and he kept his head persistently turned away. She wondered how she could ever have failed to find his profile splendid. But he seemed so detached, so bafflingly absorbed, that all the old ache that she had felt that day when he had advised her to marry Billy Dalton—and since—came suffocatingly back. The old doubt suddenly gripped her—could her aunt be mistaken?
Finally, it came to her, intuitively, that her whole future was hanging on this moment, and the impulse was overwhelming to forget that she was the woman. It seemed that she must herself force the issue and end the doubt, at all hazards—this doubt which hammered at the door of her intellect and yet which her heart refused stubbornly to accept.
"Jack"—she tried hard to carry out her resolve not to let the false pride of a moment perhaps spoil her whole life; but the inborn reserve of generations of womanhood rebelled. In her uncertainty and anguish each moment of silence seemed weighted into leaden despair, but she was utterly unable to say what she had intended. At last her lips parted and, like the wail of a lost child, "Jack——" she cried. It was all she could say before her eyes filled and a queer little gulp came into her throat; then, with superhuman effort yet hardly articulate, came the whisper, "H-ave you n-othing to say—to me?"
All at once he turned and looked at her—looked again and caught her by the shoulders. The love and ardor of which the princess had spoken flamed unmistakably in his expression now—she saw him swallow hard, and it seemed to her as though her very soul were wandering lost in the blue spaces of his eyes as they searched hers, and then through it all his voice came huskily.