“Oh, you were right,” said Wilbraham presently. “You deserve a splendid chorus in your honour, and this is the place in which to raise it.”
“There’s a German down there already declaiming Shakespeare to his wife,” announced Teresa, running to look over the edge on tiptoe.
“So long as you give me the credit, I’ll let you off the chorus,” said Mrs Maxwell, magnanimously; “and I’ll own more, I’ll own that if it hadn’t been for Peppina I should never have stood out. She knows how to get round me,” she added with a sigh.
“Nina, on the contrary, hasn’t come willingly at all.”
“She upset the oil just before starting yesterday,” said Sylvia hurriedly, “and that’s so unlucky! Wasn’t it unfortunate?”
“Very,” Wilbraham said drily.
“Look,” interposed Teresa—“look at that sheet of pink against the blue. That’s almond blossom. Oh, I must have some!”
When she went into her room at the Castello-a-mare before dinner, there lay bunches of the beautiful blossoms. She gave a cry of delight, and fell to sticking them about in all imaginable places. Nina, who came after her, explained that Wilbraham had brought them himself.
“Arms full,” she said, spreading out her own with a gay laugh.
And Teresa was touched, thinking that it must have cost him something to turn himself into a maypole for her pleasure. He was improving. She decked Sylvia with several of the pink flowers before going in to dinner, for only a pleasant Hungarian doctor and his wife would be there besides themselves, and twisted some into her own dress. The sisters went in together. Wilbraham was standing alone at the end of the room.