But Laura clearly disapproved of such precipitation; for without showing the slightest disposition to move, she replied—
“Restrain your impatience a few minutes longer, Mr. Leicester. Having formed so agreeable an acquaintance,” she continued, glancing at Lewis, “you really must allow me time to prosecute it.”
It was not in Charles Leicester’s nature to be angry with any one for five minutes consecutively; with his wife, whom he idolised, it was utterly impossible; so, making up his mind that Luigi was a kind of lion, to be regarded in the light of an exhibition, and stared at and fed accordingly, and that Laura’s sudden fancy for him was only an instance of womanly caprice—“women always went mad about celebrities,” he knew—he made a short, penitent, civil speech, and then flung himself lazily into a chair, with a look of half-bored, half-sulky resignation, which, under the circumstances, was perfectly irresistible.
That his two companions found it so was evidenced by their simultaneously bursting into a hearty fit of laughter, increased to an alarming degree by the look of blank astonishment that came over Leicester’s face at their incomprehensible conduct.
As soon as Laura could recover breath she began, “Why, Charley, you dear, good-natured, stupid old thing! don’t you see who it is yet?”
At the same moment the Mysterious One approached him, saying, “Have you quite forgotten the existence of Lewis Arundel?”
For a moment Charley gazed in half-sceptical astonishment, and then seizing his hand, and shaking it as if he were anxious to make up for his dulness by dislocating his friend’s shoulder, he exclaimed, “My dear fellow, I’m delighted to see you—I really am quite ashamed of myself—but, ’pon my word, you’ve made yourself look so particularly unlike yourself, and the whole thing altogether is so very strange and unexpected, and more like an incident in a novel than a real bona-fide transaction of every-day life, that you must hold me excused. My dear Laura, I began to think you were gone out of your senses, and that I should have to procure a keeper for you. Why, Arundel, then you’ve turned out a genius after all, a second Michael Angelo, eh! I prophesied you would, if you remember, that day when you painted the cow?”
As he spoke he stooped to pick up his cane and gloves, which in the excitement of the discovery he had allowed to drop; consequently he did not perceive the effect his words had produced upon Lewis. Did he remember the incident to which Leicester had alluded? Would to heaven he could forget that which was branded on his memory as with a red-hot iron, the fact that on the day in question he had for the first time beheld Annie Grant! He turned pale—the blood seemed to rush back upon his heart, and oppress him with a feeling of suffocation—he was forced to lean against a table for support.
These signs of emotion were not lost upon Laura’s quick eye, and rising at the moment to divert her husband’s attention, she observed, “Now I have at length succeeded in enlightening your understanding, Charley dear, I am quite at your service.”
“Come along then,” was the reply; “you’ll dine with us to-morrow without fail, Signore Luigi, alias Arundel, you polyglot mystery. ’Pon my word, it’s the oddest coincidence I ever knew, exactly like a thing in a play, where everybody turns out to be somebody else. Come along, Laura; I must try and conciliate your old friend the cicerone, too, for I swung him round in my wrath most viciously; I hope I have not dislocated any of his venerable joints; I got the steam up to no end of a height, I can tell you, when I fancied I had lost my love. By-by, al piacer di rivederla, Signore.” Thus running on, Charley Leicester tucked his wife under his arm, and having handsomely rewarded Antonelli, departed.