“Ah, you weren’t brought up on a course of fairy stories, or you’d know better—Sylvia never once told a fib in her life,” she added to Wilbraham—“so she wouldn’t listen to anything which couldn’t be guaranteed as true. I was so unscrupulous that I used to take her in whenever I could.”
“Teresa, you didn’t!” cried the girl, shocked, and turning honest helpless eyes with appeal in them to Wilbraham. Her sister laughed.
“Don’t be afraid, I can bear the burden of those sins. Granny, I wish you’d let me burn that horrid sketch you’ve stuck up there. It’s all wrong.”
Sylvia returned to her knitting; Teresa, a slim white figure, hands clasped behind her, had wandered off to stand before an easel in a dim corner. Wilbraham felt an unaccountable longing to make her turn towards him again.
“I saw your Cesare to-day,” he said.
“Did you?” She came quickly out of the shadows, and dropped on a chair. “Tell me about him, please.”
“There’s little to tell. He was talking to a man near the Trevi.”
“How did he look? Hungry?”
“Well, yes—poor,” Wilbraham admitted, “and as big a ruffian as ever.”
Teresa glanced at him mischievously.