"Company is always company," said Sor Tommaso, wisely. "Where one would not go, two go bravely. Good evening, my beautiful daughter," he added, looking up at Annetta. "The Madonna go with you."
"Thank you, and good evening," answered the girl, dropping half a courtsey, with a vicious twinkle in her little eyes.
She turned, and was out of the room in a moment. On the way home through the narrow streets in the evening glow, she sang snatches of song to herself, and thought of all she had said to Sor Tommaso, and of all he had said to her, and of how much afraid he was of her father's knife. For otherwise, as she knew, he would have had her arrested.
Suddenly, at the last turning she stopped and turned very pale, clasping both hands upon her bodice.
"Assassin!" she groaned, grinding her short white teeth. "He has poisoned me, after all! An evil death to him and all his house! Assassin!"
She forgot that she had experienced precisely the same sensations once before, when she had been overheated and had swallowed too much cold water.
CHAPTER XIII.
With slow steps, and pressing her clasped hands to her bodice, the girl reached the door of her father's house at dusk. She knew that he was away, and that as she had not come home earlier her mother would be in the lower regions preparing Dalrymple's supper for him. The door which gave access to the staircase from the street was still open, and she was almost sure of being able to reach her own room unobserved, unless she chanced to come upon Dalrymple himself on the stairs. Just then she would rather have met him than her mother. She was in great pain, and it would have been hard to explain to Sora Nanna that she believed herself to have been deliberately poisoned.